Imagine the thrill of studying languages built to run on completely separate hardware architectures, featuring entirely novel paradigms and structures.
This would be the closest thing to experience reverse-engineering a computer from an alien spaceship.
In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one.
In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a state secret. This obsession with secrecy even affected civilian infrastructure like nuclear power plants. Plant operators weren't fully trained on how the systems worked under extreme conditions, and they were kept completely in the dark about inherent design flaws—because in the Soviet system, everything was by definition perfect and superior to the West.
Furthermore, because the consumer market was strictly controlled by the government and the party, the Soviet economy lacked any organic market signals regarding what people actually wanted or needed. Apparatchiks had to look elsewhere for data, so they resorted to copying Western solutions—sometimes just copying the basic concept (like a radio where users could choose their own stations), and sometimes cloning the entire machine.
While Soviet scientists had some highly innovative and interesting ideas in the beginning, central planners eventually decided it was faster and easier to copy a Western solution that was already 5, 10, or 15 years ahead in mass production.
USSR just wasn't rich enough to afford experimentation and innovation. Resources (including human brain power) were quite limited. So they had to copy proven solutions. Simple as that.
It's easy to judge them in the retrospective. But they had to make decisions, using the information the had at the moment, weighing risks as they saw them at that moment.
The first is corruption. When the Iron Curtain fell, every country behind it suffered from corruption. The Russian word for how it worked was блат, pronounced blat. When the official way of doing things doesn't work, the way that works is informal favor trading. I have a friend, who knows a friend, etc. This acts as grit in the economic system, and makes everyone less productive.
The second was the pressure to not stand out too much. One proverb is Инициатива наказуема, pronounced initsiativa nakazuema. It translates to, "Initiative is punishable."
Why? Well, imagine that you're a middle manager. It's a dog eat dog world. You know that everyone below you, wants your job. Everyone above you, knows that you want their job. You got your role by sucking up to the people above you. Those below you, got theirs by sucking up to you. You don't want your employees to be utterly incompetent - then you won't be able to look good. But you also don't want any of them to shine - then your boss might think that they should have your job. This encourages bland mediocracy. Everyone strives to be just good enough for their job, while sucking up well enough to keep it.
The result is a kind of learned incompetence. But a nation filled with this kind of incompetence, will be unable to sustain innovation.
The third is alcoholism. Russia is basically a very large, very dysfunctional, alcoholic family. It is hard to overstate how true that is. The most popular vodka at the end of the Soviet era came in 750 ml bottles, that did not have a resealable cap. Because no true Russian would leave a bottle half-full. Anyone who didn't drink, was odd. A group that got together without drinking might be suspected of plotting revolution. This is yet another drag on Russian society.
1. how far behind the West it was, and
2. that there were no other secrets
But then I read much more about the design, and it turns out that the reason machine was ternary is the designers had to minimize number of transistors, and leaned heavily into transformer-based logic - which naturally favors ternary values.
But for transistor/IC circuitry, there are no advantages in ternary - they key to reliability is margins, and margins require only two states. Any transistor-based ternary implementation would be forced to using a pair of bits and declare one of the four states invalid - a clear efficiency loss.
History confirmed it - even in MSU, once transistors became more available, they abandoned SETUN and started using those. Turns out at least that ternary branch was just a evolutionary dead end.
Mind you I still think it would have likely been impossible for political reasons, there were many structural incentives to falsify economic data in the USSR due to the high degree of corruption and patronage among the nomenklatura. The whole point of cybernetics is to treat economic problems as systems problems and expose data transparently, and given the USSR was structurally dependent on falsifying this data suddenly having an accurate picture might have actually been destabilising kind of like how Glasnost turned out to be.
Another interesting 'Soviets had decent computers' counterfactual is that the Chernobyl disaster might have been prevented, since the Kurchartov Institute would have been better able to characterise the processes in the bottom of the fatally flawed RBMK in low power regimes before it was put into mass production. Again this might not have actually helped, the overconfidence the Soviet system had in its scientific and technical institutions was high and genuinely really interesting.
The language itself is quite similar to Visual Basic. It's awkward to write with a regular Russian keyboard layout, but I was told that there exist special layouts just for it.
FUNC FACT (N);
NAME: R;
1 -> P;
FOR I FROM 1 TO N ::
R * I -> R
ALL
RES: R
KNC;
FOR N FROM 0 TO 6 ::
? "FACT(", N, ") = ", FACT(N)
ALL;1. "ИМЕНА" is plural, so instead of "NAME:" it's a bit more appropriate to use "NAMES:". Probably should be "VARIABLES" or "VARS" in modern context.
2. You've got few typos mixing "R" and "P". Should be "R" everywhere.
3. Instead of "ALL" you should use "DONE".
4. Instead of "KNC" you should use "END".
So it would look like this:
FUNC FACT (N);
NAMES: R;
1 -> R;
FOR I FROM 1 TO N ::
R * I -> R
DONE
RES: R
END;
FOR N FROM 0 TO 6 ::
? "FACT(", N, ") = ", FACT(N)
DONE;replace cyrillic w/ russian and it'd be ok.
КНЦ = end (конец in russian is end). However, in bulgarian in means 'thread' (as in sewing thread) and it has lots its meaning of end, aside from 'from needle to thread' expression where it means from the tip of the needle to the end of the thread.
Also 'ALL' (и все = it's over/that's all), which should be 'end' as in begin/end in pascal.
The main point still stands - it's Pascal.
With that being said, I do think it's harder to make a clear programming language based on is a Slavic language, due to all the case and gender forms.
You can use "конец" for "end" in Bulgarian too, even though it's antiquated.
FUNC FACT (N);
NAMES: P; (* variable names *)
1 -> P;
FOR I FROM 1 TO N ::
P * I -> P
DONE (* endif *)
RET: P (* return value *)
END; (* end of function *)
FOR N FROM 0 TO 6 ::
? "FACT(", N, ") = ", FACT(Н) (* print *)
DONE;Also, «ВСЕ» feels like «ВСЁ» in this context, I’d translate that as “that’s all”.
Everyone's happy, head of development celebrates his 3rd degree Lenin's premium.
https://www.amazon.com/100-Rapira-Platinum-Razor-Blades/dp/B...
This is a pretty cool historical artifact.
Does anyone use "native language" programming languages in education or day to day?
UPD: 1C can be used in both Russian and English. And I'm pretty sure it can be used outside of 1C:Enterprise.
It also has BSL Language Server and IDEA\VSCode extensions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...
Rapira was more like SETL + Python. It was a dynamic interpreted PL with a rich set of compound data types, such as sets, records (associative arrays), and so on. Compared to the contemporary BASIC, it was ADVANCED
Like Logo, Robik was used to teach programming to kindergarthen-age children, while Rapira was aimed at high school students
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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robic / https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BA
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira / https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%80...
UPD: The PLs were called "Roo&Robby" and written by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Sapir before he emigrated to the US.