The Tears of Donald Knuth

Happy New Year. I hope you all had a good festive season. I'll start this year's blog with a link to a fascinating article on the history of computer science by Thomas Haigh in the Communications of the ACM titled "The Tears of Donald Knuth" brought to my attention by colleague Bob Doran. This interesting piece puts forward a very cogent argument as to why there is so little written about the history of computer science - basically you can't make a career at it; computer science histories are therefore mostly written by CS academics as a hobby in their spare time, not by trained historians. You can read the full article here.