2026-10-20 — quietus

Morning, friend. Tuesday, third week of October — the stretch of the year when the calendar starts closing things for you whether or not you've finished them.

Quietus is the old clerk's Latin quietus est, "he is quit": the line an Exchequer official wrote at the foot of an account when the debt was settled. Shakespeare borrowed it for death in Hamlet (III.i), which is how it reached the rest of us. It was a receipt first.

No joke today, and no weather. Today is an obituary.

ABC

ABC, a programming language, of Amsterdam, has died. It was never formally pronounced, and no date was recorded; the people who knew it best place the death somewhere in the early 1990s. The interpreter can still be downloaded from the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. Nobody has ever mistaken that for being alive.

ABC was born B, in 1975, at the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam, to Lambert Meertens and Leo Geurts. Its father had recently been one of the editors of the Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68. The child was meant to be the opposite kind of language: something a scientist or a schoolteacher could pick up in an afternoon and use instead of BASIC. Steven Pemberton joined the family in the early 1980s. The child was renamed ABC in the middle of that decade and made its public debut in 1987. Its biography, The ABC Programmer's Handbook (Geurts, Meertens, Pemberton; Prentice Hall, 1990), was reissued in 2005 and is difficult to find.

It was a principled language and could be difficult company. It had five types — numbers, texts, compounds, lists, and tables — and no limits on any of them. Its numbers were exact: 1/3 stayed one third until you asked otherwise. Its lists were always sorted. You did not get a say. Assignment was written PUT x IN y. Procedures were declared HOW TO. Blocks were marked by indentation, and every block-opening line ended in a colon, a detail that came out of watching real users read real code. It shipped inside its own editor, which suggested the rest of each keyword as you typed. It did not care much for files, or for Unix, or for anything outside itself.

That last quality is generally given as the cause of death. ABC arrived as a complete world on machines that wanted a tool. It was hard to extend, hard to embed, and hard to point at the filesystem. It was the right language for a computer that sat in a classroom and talked to nobody, and by the time it was finished, those computers were being networked.

ABC is survived by Python.

Guido van Rossum worked on ABC's implementation at CWI in the early 1980s. In December 1989, by then on the Amoeba distributed operating system project, he spent the Christmas break writing an interpreter for a scripting language that kept what he thought ABC had got right and dropped what he thought had killed it. He posted Python 0.9.0 to alt.sources in February 1991. It had indentation. It had the colon. It had lists, tuples, and dictionaries, which were ABC's tables under a new name. It talked to the operating system on its first day. The Python design FAQ still answers the question "Why are colons required for the if/while/def/class statements?" with the parenthetical one of the results of the experimental ABC language. That FAQ entry is the closest thing the family has to a headstone.

The sorted lists did not make it. Neither did PUT x IN y, the editor, or exact thirds by default; fractions.Fraction is there if you ask for it. ABC got the rest of what it wanted. Python is the language schoolteachers and scientists now pick up in an afternoon instead of BASIC, which is the sentence its parents wrote in 1975, delivered by someone else.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you end the line with a colon.

Primary sources:

  • Geurts, Leo, Lambert Meertens, and Steven Pemberton. The ABC Programmer's Handbook. Prentice Hall, 1990. Reissued by Bosko Books, 2005. The language as its makers described it, with the design rationale for sorted lists and the HOW TO unit.
  • van Rossum, Guido. The History of Python (blog), entries "Early Language Design and Development" and "Personal History — part 1, CWI," January 2009. His own account of working on ABC, what he took from it, and why he thought it failed.
  • Python Software Foundation. Design and History FAQ, "Why are colons required for the if/while/def/class statements?" docs.python.org, current edition.

Today's goal

Pick one thing you've been pretending you'll get back to, friend — a repo, a half-read book, a draft, a tab that has been open since summer — and close it on purpose. Write one sentence about what it was for and what it taught you, then archive, shelve, or delete it. That's the quietus: not the abandonment, the receipt. Things you've actually finished with take up less room than things you've only stopped touching.

Today's toy is the quietus — a small churchyard for side projects. Lay a stone for each one you've finally let go: name, years, cause of death, who it's survived by, one line of epitaph. Click a stone for its obituary. ABC is already buried in the corner plot. Everything stays in your browser. Lives in the corner.

What did your last abandoned project leave behind that you still use?

Go close something.

— C