Comment by fabianholzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fabianholzer | Hacker News Reader

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Coincidentally, I reread the paper last weekend, and that side remark, about how the KWIC index would take a week or two to implement got my attention. So, I took the short specification given in the paper, and wrote it down in two dozen lines within a few minutes. I wrote it up as a blogpost just yesterday: https://holzer.online/articles/2025/03-05-kwic-quickly/

With a bit of cocktail napkin math that more than a factor of 100 faster than Parnas' estimate, just for having a higher language with a reasonable standard library at your hands.

Fred Brooks wrote in his 1986 "No silver bullet" essay that "There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.". - but the compound effects of many years of many, many gradual improvements in developer tooling are really not bad.

The paper came out in 1972 which is the same year that C was invented. I don't think the paper mentioned what programming language was used, but since it has function calls with parameters, it's a higher level language than assembly.

The full KWIC index program specification can be found in the original 1971 paper (reference [8] in the 1972 paper): https://kilthub.cmu.edu/articles/journal_contribution/On_the...

The code therein uses the specification language described in https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/355602.361309 (reference [3] in the 1972 paper). From there:

"The notation is mainly ALGOL-like and requires little explanation. To distinguish references to the value of a function before calling the specified function from references to its value after the call, we enclose the old or previous value in single quotes (e.g. 'VAL'). If the value does not change, the quotes are optional. Brackets ("[" and "]") are used to indicate the scope of quantifiers. "=" is the relation "equals" and not the assignment operator as in FORTRAN."

Thanks for the additional context. This is very interesting.

Yeah! I liked your blog post :)

We can all be 100x programmers, if we look at a broader timespan.

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