Bliss

Ned’s post on the BLISS programming language reminded me of my first job. I worked for Applicon as a software developer on their next-generation CAD/CAM system code-named FAST*.

Applicon’s existing CAD system ran on the PDP-11 and was written in Macro-11 assembler. When Digital introduced the VAX, Applicon saw the opportunity to move to a 32-bit platform and develop in a high-level language. They passed on Unix and C, feeling that the platform was not mature enough. They decided to use VAX/VMS and to write the new system in PL/I Subset G. PL/I may seem like a strange language choice but at the time it was the only high-level language for VMS that had a decent optimizing compiler (Digital hadn’t done VMS compilers for C et al yet). Also a number of people on the team knew PL/I from their days at MIT with Multics.

So where does BLISS come in? Generating code with full debug symbols for PL/1 was costly and the debugger didn’t really understand PL/1 syntax anyway. So when you fired up the debugger the first thing you’d type was the command SET LANG BLISS to indicate that you wanted to use BLISS syntax for variables and expressions. It sounds weird to me now but we really did debug PL/1 code using BLISS syntax.

* Footnote: the code-name FAST stood for “Future Applicon Systems Technology”. The joke was that when we shipped it would be renamed PAST for “Present Applicon Systems Technology”. When the product shipped the marketing folks decided to call it BRAVO! (including the exclamation point in the name). That exclamation point was irritating when you wanted to refer to the product in a spec or email. It seemed like you were Just! Too! Darned! Excited! About! Bravo! But maybe Applicon was prescient: they beat Yahoo! by a decade in the usage of a silly appended exclamation point.