This triggers some personal memories. I have a letter from her,
basically a rejection letter, saying I couldn’t have a summer job with
them (Boston Advanced Programming group) until I finished my second year
in college. Although I don’t remember ever hearing the name of the
project, one of the IBMers described it to me as “like Fortran, but
symbolic rather than purely numeric.” Clearly it was FORMAC.
I always assumed Jean Sammet was a (French) man, but now, 55 years
later, I see “(Miss)” written before her signature.
By the next summer, I had pretty much dropped my interest in computers
and spent the summer paddling a canoe to Hudson Bay and it took me about
20 years to get back into software.
--Barry
On 4 Jun 2017, at 11:01, Marcus Daniels wrote:
She had the right idea about FORMAC. Only a reality now with systems
like SymPy 50 years later. But an evolved FORMAC would have been
better, as it would have been a high performance numerics language
too.
http://www.pl-enthusiast.net/2017/05/24/jean-sammet-a-remembrance/
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