Questions tagged [history]
For questions about the history of programming and computing.
356 questions
6 votes
1 answer
474 views
TCL/Tk: Why is it an error for a window/widget's name to start with an uppercase letter?
I was going to ask this on Stack Overflow, but after doing some reading, I guess history questions are considered off-topic there and should be asked here instead? Anyway, as to the question: Perhaps ...
- 71
8 votes
1 answer
2k views
What was COBOL's syntax first described in?
Nowadays, it's very common to use BNF (or extensions thereof) to describe the syntaxes of various programming languages or their constructs. What was the situation like 60+ years ago? COBOL and BNF ...
- 132
1 vote
1 answer
279 views
Does SQL Server Agent predate Windows Task Scheduler?
An old guru once told me that SQL Server Agent was created because Windows Task Scheduler did not exist at the time. However, all of my research shows that they both released in 1995. For Task ...
- 1,015
0 votes
2 answers
525 views
Where does the practice of naming variables with the prefix "my" come from?
I recognize that there are situations in which "my" is semantically useful, but I have met multiple professional programmers that have a habit of using this everywhere that it's not - "...
- 45
5 votes
3 answers
791 views
What was the first company to make a drag-and-drop GUI designer like Visual Basic?
When Visual Basic came out, it was revolutionary for its drag-and-drop GUI designer, allowing users to quickly create GUI programs. This video shows Bill Gates introducing it in 1991. Did drag-and-...
- 163
2 votes
1 answer
332 views
Did the term "decorator" originate with OOP design patterns?
The Decorator pattern allows behaviour to be dynamically added to an existing object, effectively "decorating" it with new behaviour. While the pattern as formalised and named seems to have ...
- 207
1 vote
2 answers
366 views
Why did TC39 name JavaScript's array predicate functions `some` and `every` instead of `any` and `all`?
Python, Ruby, Rust, Haskell, Kotlin, C#, C++, Perl, MATLAB, SQL, and R all call their respective array predicate checking functions any and all. Is there any record of why JavaScript's designers ...
- 127
7 votes
1 answer
336 views
Why is the highest NUMERIC precision in most RDBMS 38?
SQL-92 says: 16)For the <exact numeric type>s DECIMAL and NUMERIC: a) The maximum value of <precision> is implementation-defined. <precision> ...
- 277