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that Joe Accountant can learn easily, then you're still going to have
problems because you're probably going to have a lousy language.”
49
Fred Gruenberger, a staff mathematician at RAND, later summed up the
essence of the entire debate: “COBOL, in the hands of a master, is a
beautiful tool—a very powerful tool. COBOL, as it's going to be handled
by a low grade clerk somewhere, will be a miserable mess. . . . Some guys
are just not as smart as others. They can distort anything.”
50
There were also less obviously utilitarian reasons for developing new
programming languages, however. Many common objections raised
against existing languages were more matters of style rather than sub-
stance. The rationale given for creating a new language often boiled
down to a declaration that “this new language will be easier to use or
better to read or write than any of its predecessors.” Since there were
generally no standards for what was meant by “easier to use or better
to read or write,” such declarations can only be considered statements
of personal preference. As Jean Sammet has suggested, although lengthy
arguments have been advanced on all sides of the major programming
language controversies, “in the last analysis it almost always boils down
to a question of personal style or taste.”
51
For the more academically oriented programmers, designing a new
language was a relatively easy way to attract grant money and publish
articles. There have been numerous languages that have been rigorously
described but never implemented. They served only to prove a theoretical
point or advance an individual's career. In addition, many in the aca-
demic community seemed to be affl icted with the NIH (“not invented
here”) syndrome: any language or technology that was designed by
someone else could not possibly be as good as one that you invented
yourself, and so a new version needed to be created to fi ll some ostensible
personal or functional need. As Herbert Grosch lamented in 1961, fi lling
these needs was personally satisfying yet ultimately self-serving and
divisive: “Pride shades easily into purism, the sin of the mathematicians.
To be the leading authority, indeed the only authority, on ALGOL 61B
mod 12, the version that permits black letter as well as Hebrew sub-
scripts, is a satisfying thing indeed, and many of us have constructed
comfortable private universes to explore.”
52
One fi nal and closely related reason for the proliferation of program-
ming languages is that designing programming languages was (and is)
fun. The adoption of metalanguages and the BNF allowed for the rapid
development and implementation of creative new languages and dialects.
If programming was enjoyable, even more so was language design.
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