!!Con West 2019 - Eric Fischer: if … then … else had to be invented!

Presented at !!Con West 2019: http://bangbangcon.com/west 60 years ago, several of the world’s foremost computer scientists came together to create the first international programming language standard. The language they created, Algol, is remembered for introducing block structure and for sparking controversy over exactly what it means to pass a parameter to a function. But Algol’s creators also wrestled for years with the core question of how to communicate that in one circumstance a computer should do a certain thing, and in different circumstances it should do something different. I will describe the paradigm of conditional program execution that existed before Algol, the alternatives that the language’s creators considered, the final form they chose, and how it shaped our thoughts going forward.