Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The real question of historical interest, of course, is not so much why
specifi c individual programming languages were created but rather why
so many
. In the late 1940s and early 1950s there was no real program-
ming community per se, only particular projects being developed at
various institutions. Each project necessarily developed its own tech-
niques for facilitating programming. By the mid-1950s, however, there
were established mechanisms for communicating new research and
development, and there were deliberate attempts to promote industry-
wide programming standards. Nevertheless, there were literally hundreds
of languages developed in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. FORTRAN
and COBOL have emerged as important standards in the scientifi c and
business communities, respectively, and yet new languages continued—
and still do—to be created.
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What can explain this curious Cambrian
explosion in the evolutionary history of programming languages?
Some of the many divergent species of programming languages can
be understood by looking at their functional characteristics. Although
general-purpose languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL were suit-
able for a wide variety of problem domains, certain applications required
more specialized functions to perform most effi ciently. The General-
Purpose Simulation System was designed specifi cally for the simulation
of system elements in discrete numerical analysis, for example. APT was
commissioned by the Aircraft Industries Association and the U.S. Air
Force to be used primarily to control automatic milling machines. Other
languages were designed not so much for specialized problem domains
as for particular pedagogical purposes—in the case of BASIC, for instance,
the teaching of basic computer literacy. Some languages were known for
their fast compilation times, and others for the effi ciency of their object
code. Individual manufacturers produced languages that were optimized
for their own hardware, or as part of a larger marketing strategy.
Different languages were also developed with different users in mind.
In this sense, they embodied the organizational and professional politics
of programming in this period. At the RAND Symposium on Programming
Languages in 1962, for example, Jack Little, a RAND consultant,
lamented the tendency of manufacturers to design languages “for use by
some sub-human species in order to get around training and having good
programmers.”
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Dick Talmadge and Barry Gordon of IBM admitted to
thinking in terms of an imaginary “Joe Accountant” user; the problem
that IBM faced, according to Bernard Galler, of the University of
Michigan Computing Center, was that “if you can design a language
