"A History of MATLAB", a 67-page paper that Jack Little and I have written, has been published by the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, in the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, volume 4, June 2020.

The publication had been intended to accompany HOPL IV, the Fourth ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference, scheduled to begin tomorrow in London. The conference has been postponed, but the proceedings have arrived on schedule.

There are 50 archival references and almost 40 additional non-archival references in the paper, many of them to this blog. There are 34 figures, including several MathWorks company portraits in a photo gallery appendix.

The Proceedings on Programming Languages in the ACM Digital Library is published with open access, so the HOPL IV papers are freely available to ACM members and nonmembers alike.

In addition to MATLAB, the 19 papers in the HOPL IV volume include histories of APL, C++, Clojure, Fortran coarrays, D, Emacs Lisp, F#, Groovy, JavaScript, LabVIEW, Logo, Cambridge Polish, Objective-C, Oz, R, S, Smalltalk, ML, and Verilog HDL.

Here are the first four pages of our MATLAB history. They provide an abstract, a prologue, a table of contents, and a summary calendar.

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® R2020a