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ing automatic programming systems, which he saw as little more than
mnemonic code assemblers or collections of subroutines. He also felt
little regard for most contemporary human programmers, who he often
derisively insisted on referring to as coders. When asked about the trans-
formation of the coder into the programmer, for instance, Backus dismis-
sively suggested that “it's the same reason that janitors are now called
'custodians.' 'Programmer' was considered a higher class enterprise than
'coder,' and things have a tendency to move in that direction.”
16
A truly automatic programming language, believed Backus, would
allow scientists and engineers to communicate directly with the com-
puter, thus eliminating the need for ineffi cient and unreliable program-
mers.
17
The only way that such a system would be widely adopted,
however, was to ensure that the code it produced would be at least as
effi cient, in terms of size and performance, as that produced by its human
counterparts.
18
Indeed, one of the primary objections raised against
automatic programming languages in this period was their relative inef-
fi ciency: one of the higher-level languages used by SAGE developers
produced programs that ran an order of magnitude slower than those
hand coded by a top-notch programmer.
19
In an era when programming
skill was considered to be a uniquely creative and innate ability, and
when the state of contemporary hardware made performance consider-
ations paramount, users were understandably skeptical of the value of
automatically generated machine code.
20
The focus of the FORTRAN developers was therefore on the construc-
tion of an effi cient compiler, rather than on the design of the language.
In order to ensure that the object code produced by the FORTRAN
compiler was as effi cient as possible, several design compromises had to
be made. FORTRAN was originally intended primarily for use on the
IBM 704, and contained several device-specifi c instructions. Little thought
was given to making FORTRAN machine independent, and early imple-
mentations varied greatly from computer to computer, even those devel-
oped by the same manufacturer. The language was also designed solely
for use in numerical computations, and was therefore diffi cult to use for
applications requiring the manipulation of alphanumeric data. The fi rst
FORTRAN manual made this focus on mathematical problem solving
clear: “The FORTRAN language is intended to be capable of expressing
any problem of numerical computation. In particular, it deals easily with
problems containing large sets of formulae and many variables and it
permits any variable to have up to three independent subscripts.” For
