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• Aging and obsolete languages have few programmers who know them.
• Multiple languages in the same application make debugging difficult.
• There are no firm guidelines for language selection; the reasoning re-
sembles that of a cult.
• Security flaws appear to be endemic in a majority of popular languages.
This topic is not the proper place for dealing with the issues surrounding the
existence of so many programming languages and the absence of real proof that
these numerous languages are helpful to the software engineering domain.
Other authors and other topics can prove that so many languages are either
helpful or harmful to software engineering. I think that all these languages may be
doing more harm than good, but that is a subjective opinion from casual observa-
tions and not based on solid data.
JCL was another ubiquitous language developed in this decade in several dia-
lects and varieties. It was used to schedule the execution sequences of applica-
tions under the various IBM operating systems. JCL is not a true programming
language but rather was the forerunner of scripting languages that control execu-
tion sequences. No less a luminary than Dr. Fred Brooks called JCL the ugliest
language ever developed.
Leaving languages, in the middle of the 1960s, Martin Goetz filed the first
software patent in 1965, and this introduced the first known commercial software
package, Autoflow, also in 1965.
The early 1960s also witnessed the initial development of database technology,
which later became a primary use for digital computers. The CODASYL data de-
scription and the IBM IMS database were both released circa 1962. Relational
databases would not occur until the following decade.
Based on research at MIT, Ivan Sutherland published an early paper on object-
oriented programming in 1963. Later, in 1967, the Simula programming language
introduced classes and instances, or objects. Many other object-oriented languages
would follow in the next decades.
The programming languages of APL, BASIC, and PL/I were developed during
this decade. The acronym APL stands for
a programming language
. This is a
highly mathematical language developed by Ken Iverson with Adin Falkoff of
IBM. The language concepts stem from a report in 1957, but the first working ver-
sion of APL was not ready until 1960.
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