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Department of Defense decided that what was needed to deal with this
most recent outbreak of crisis was yet another new programming lan-
guage—in this case ADA, which was trumpeted as a means of “replacing
the idiosyncratic 'artistic' ethos that has long governed software writing
with a more effi cient, cost-effective engineering mind-set.” 58
Why have automatic programming languages and other technologies
thus far failed to resolve—or apparently even mitigate—the seemingly
perpetual software crisis? First of all, it is clear that many of these lan-
guages and systems were not able to live up to their marketing hype.
Even those systems that were more than a “complex, exception-ridden
performer of clerical tasks which was diffi cult to use and ineffi cient” (as
John Backus characterized the programming tools of the early 1950s)
could not eliminate the need for careful analysis and skilled program-
ming. 59 As Willis Ware portrayed the situation in 1965, “We lament the
cost of programming; we regret the time it takes. What we really are
unhappy with is the total programming process, not programming (i.e.,
writing routines) per se. Nonetheless, people generally smear the details
into one big blur; and the consequence is, we tend to conclude errone-
ously that all our problems will vanish if we can improve the language
which stands between the machine and the programmer. T'aint neces-
sarily so.” All the programming language improvement in the world will
not shorten the intellectual activity, thinking, and analysis that is inher-
ent in the programming process. Another name for the programming
process is “problem solving by machine; perhaps it suggests more point-
edly the inherent intellectual content of preparing large problems for
machine handling.” 60
Although programming languages could reduce the amount of clerical
work associated with programming, and did help eliminate certain types
of errors (mostly those associated with transcription errors or syntax
mistakes), they also introduced new sources of error. In the late 1960s,
a heated controversy broke out in the programming community over
the use of the “GOTO statement.” 61 At the heart of this debate was the
question of professionalism: although high-level languages gave the
impression that just about anyone could program, many programmers
felt this was a misconception disastrous to both their profession and the
industry in general.
The designers and advocates of various automatic programming
systems never succeeded in addressing the larger issues posed by the dif-
fi culties inherent in the programming process. High-level languages were
necessary but not suffi cient: that is, the use of these languages became
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