Tower of Babel
Tower of Babel
This chapter examines the emergence of programming languages as a means of managing the complexity of the programming process. It traces the development of several of the most prominent automatic programming languages including FORTRAN and COBOL and evaluates their significance as potential solutions to the software crisis of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The analysis indicates that while programming languages reduced the amount of clerical work associated with programming, they did not eliminate certain types of errors and even introduced new ones.
Keywords: programming languages, programming process, FORTRAN, COBOL, software crisis, clerical work, errors
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