Critical Program Reading (1975) [video]

Wonderful stuff. Gerald Weinberg had a huge influence on at least the 1990s generation of testers, with his ethnographic approach. He doesn't seem to have had as much influence on the same generation of programmers. Perhaps the techniques he described had already been internalised?

Dennis Geller is the author of Structured Programming in APL[2] and Tom Plum seems to have gone on to a career in writing books on C[3].

It looks like this film is just one part of a series, probably presenting approaches from Weinberg's early structured programming books[1].

I'd love to know where this gem was discovered and if the rest of the putative series still exists.

[1] https://www.geraldmweinberg.com/Bookstuff/Each_Book/Early_Bo... [2] https://books.google.ie/books/about/Structured_Programming_i... [3] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1420419.Thomas_Plum

The idea of multiple-word-identifier not using an underscore threw me at first, but back in history, you couldn't always count on having underscores, etc. It only took a minute to get past it.

I was intrigued at the foreshadowing of Python's syntactically important indenting.

Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34128901

Guido Van Rossum must have watched this before deciding on using indention as a block structure in Python.