Early Programming Languages

Spring 2022

Introduction

This week you'll read a paper summarizing the history of high-level languages up through the late 1950s. Given the ubiquity of high-level programming languages today, it's easy to forget that there was an era before compilers. Early programmers worked directly with machine language, and it took some time for the notion of high-level languages and automatic translation to come into focus and reach acceptance. This paper will take us one more step down the road toward the modern discipline of computer science — the previous group of papers left off with the birth of electronic computers and, in the decade that followed, researchers had to develop more effective ways to program them. The Knuth paper is on the long side, but you don't have to read it in detail. You can stop skimming at page 63 after FORTRAN has been introduced, and don't bother spending much time trying to understand the code examples in the various languages — just get a sense for the kinds of languages that were around at the time, and their general features.

Questions

As before, when reading this paper, don't get too hung up on the low-level details. I'm more interested in having you come away from the readings with the Big Picture. In particular, skim the code being presented and focus more on what's being said about the languages and tools Here are some questions you might try to answer as you read:

What is TPK?
When did the assignment statement become common?
What was Grace Hopper's advice about symbols?
Why was "an improvement in the coding process" not regarded then as a "breakthrough of any importance"?
How many of the "languages" in the paper were compiled?
What languages were early compilers written in?
How many of the languages were universal (capable of computing any computable function)?
What was the first high-level language to be implemented? When?
Looking back, why did Glennie think his compiler had failed to catch on?
Where did the term "compiler" come from?
What would lead a programmer to be "subject to psychiatric observation" in 1954?
What was Backus's "one primary fear"?
According to the original FORTRAN report, how long would it take for programmers to learn to read FORTRAN code?
How long could variable names be in the original version of FORTRAN?

Papers

Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo. 1976. "The Early Development of Programming Languages." Computer Science Department, Stanford University. [link]