> Computer programming is still a black art. It's less than fifty years old, and nobody is very good at it yet. We can make better tools than we know how to use.
>In the middle 1970's, the IBM corporation did (and perhaps still does) most of their in-house programming in a computer language called FORTRAN.
Sorry, I doubt that. In the middle 70s it was COBOL, when COBOL'74 came out it became king of in-house programming for IBM and many other companies.
Now if you said the 60s or science based programming, I would agree with you about FORTRAN. But in-house usually means running the business, that is where COBOL rules.
Now, in-house is SAP ABAP, I think that took over at IBM in the mid to late 90s and early 00s. But IBM is moving to the next release of SAP and from what I heard from people there, ABAP is being phased out for something new that SAP came up with.
Before the Dragon Book some commercial compilers used heroic techniques that got superior performance along various axes.
Which? And do you mean compilers stopped using those approaches?
In the mid-1970s Alan k. Was working at Xerox Parc creating Smalltalk and the future.
Sadly, it didn't sell paper.
> Computer programming is still a black art. It's less than fifty years old, and nobody is very good at it yet. We can make better tools than we know how to use.
>In the middle 1970's, the IBM corporation did (and perhaps still does) most of their in-house programming in a computer language called FORTRAN.
Sorry, I doubt that. In the middle 70s it was COBOL, when COBOL'74 came out it became king of in-house programming for IBM and many other companies.
Now if you said the 60s or science based programming, I would agree with you about FORTRAN. But in-house usually means running the business, that is where COBOL rules.
Now, in-house is SAP ABAP, I think that took over at IBM in the mid to late 90s and early 00s. But IBM is moving to the next release of SAP and from what I heard from people there, ABAP is being phased out for something new that SAP came up with.
> In the middle 70s it was COBOL, when COBOL'74 came out it became king of in-house programming for IBM
I thought IBM were still focused on APL in the 70s…
> Sorry, I doubt that. In the middle 70s it was COBOL, when COBOL'74 came out it became king of in-house programming for IBM and many other companies.
Depends very much on what the house did. Business programming ? COBOL. Scientific programming (data analysis, prediction, math) ? FORTAN.