leoc

The HOPL 2 paper "The evolution of Lisp" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/154766.155373 covers about 1963-1992.

Tantacrul (software project manager, UX guy, muso and YouTuber)’s “Music on Reality TV is Insanely Manipulative” https://youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I is pretty good.

Current self-driving systems also require periodic manual intervention from remote operators https://www.reuters.com/technology/waymo-defends-use-remote-... , for that matter.

But an appropriate level of caution about change is necessary. Change isn't always good https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter... , and it doesn't always deliver what it promises or arrive on schedule.

I assume it’s in part a consequence of Blow’s newer self-definition as a game-programming iron man: after all the work on the custom engine you probably feel the need to get as much mileage as you can out of it. But as others have said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115215 , presumably they could have applied some razzle-dazzle like staged releases in “seasons” to make the large amount of content feel more like ongoing fun than a huge homework assignment.

There's also Backus' "Programming in America in the 1950s – Some Personal Impressions" talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EylBknGtkqA at the 1976 First International Research Conference on the History of Computing. The conference paper is pp. 125-135 https://archive.org/details/historyofcomputi0000inte/page/12... in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (1980, Metropolis, Howlett and Rota eds., ISBN 0-12-491650-3 ). Naturally it also got a session at the first History of Programming Languages conference in 1978 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/960118.808379 at which Backus spoke again https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/800025#sec2 . And of course it's one of the stars of Jean Sammet's 1969 Programming languages: history and fundamentals book (ISBN 0137299885) where the FORTRAN section begins on p. 143 https://archive.org/details/programminglangu00unse/page/143/... .