FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging

http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusEtAl-Preliminary%20Report-1954.pdf

by cavedave • 14 years ago

62 24 14 years ago

praptak3• 14 years ago

Well, it did eliminate some kinds of coding (the part where human produces machine code from block diagrams) and debugging (the part where you look for errors in the above translation.)

acqq• 14 years ago

Exactly. There are things that FORTRAN did right and that deserve to be studied even now:

http://groups.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/fort...

Just a day ago I've mentioned that the printf equivalent that existed in FORTRAN as early as 1956 was able to do the type checking of the parameters and the compile-time code generation, versus the run-time interpretation as in C's printf.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3964475

KC8ZKF• 14 years ago

Yes, and the paper distinguishes between programming and coding. Step one is "Analysis and Programming", step two is "Coding." It's step two that FORTRAN virtually eliminates.

gruseom• 14 years ago

Correct. It's only because of the success of higher-level languages like FORTRAN that "coding" and "programming" came to mean the same thing. Before that, programming was part of the requirements.

We've become inured to silver-bullet bullshit in software, but it's an anachronism to think that about this report, which was dead right. In fact by subsequent standards their claim was rather modest. The full quote reads:

Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging, it should be possible to solve problems for less than half the cost that would be required without such a system.

lifthrasiir• 14 years ago

Please mind that the report was written in 1954. The real complexity of programming and computing in general was not fully understood at that time. (I'm confident that we still do not understand it in its entirety, however.)

Edootjuh• 14 years ago

What do you mean by that, exactly? Just out of curiosity.

praptak3• 14 years ago

Many results about unfeasibility of computer-based solutions to some problems were not known. For example the first important results about NP-hardness come from the seventies.

I believe it wasn't even clear that the big O complexity is important in assessing how effective an algorithm is. This is pretty much obvious to us now (sometimes too obvious - there are some edge cases when the constant factor wins over the asymptotic complexity).

michaelochurch• 14 years ago

Not grandparent post.

I think that one of the differences is that, in 1954, computer programs were single entities written by one person or by a team working closely together. So the "between two pieces of working code" bugs-- which tend to be the nastiest kind in modern development-- weren't really seen yet. Million-line codebases weren't even on the table as a reasonable concept, and the idea of a program depending on 120 other libraries or frameworks was unimaginable.

DeepDuh• 14 years ago

Being currently involved in GPGPU research, these descriptions remind me of the state we are in for GPGPU computing. CUDA, OpenCL and now OpenACC have been steps towards a higher-level abstraction of stream computing and every time a new framework / language bubbles up, the inventors praise it as the end of coding close to the machine.

jhrobert• 14 years ago

Half a century later, people are still overly optimistic about software development. According to recent studies, this is true for everything (and society at large is actually in favor of it).

Yet it is particulary visible in computing. Why is that?

Side note: bullshit in marketing brochure is here to stay.

maclaren• 14 years ago

Half a century later the change isn't from assembly to an actually useful level of abstraction. The bullshit-o-meter is damped further when half the document shows code examples that would be much more difficult in assembly.

koeselitz2• 14 years ago

What's overly optimistic about saying that interpreted languages will virtually eliminate the need to hand-debug machine code? Isn't that what happened?

Peaker• 14 years ago

Compared to hand-writing machine code, it might even be a reasonable thing to say. The majority of effort is eliminated.

ericHosick2• 14 years ago

This vision of eliminating coding will eventually be realized. It is inevitable.

However, people will still need to know how to program (AI not being a factor).

josefonseca2• 14 years ago

> eliminating coding will eventually be realized > people will still need to know how to program

I think that by coding, you mean typing? In your example, we won't be eliminating coding, we'll just be entering code using a different language.

ericHosick2• 14 years ago

Not coding and not a programming language to speak of. For example, when someone configures their browser to use a proxy server they are programming without coding (though they do need to type).

It could be possible to verbally configure the browser to use a proxy server and I guess that would be the different language you speak of. However, this leads to the need for AI or some kind of "intelligent" system: difficult to make one that isn't domain specific.

Though such an intelligent system is also inevitable (in my opinion), I think there is a step between describing software using such a system and writing code as we do today.

This step would be some kind of domain agnostic software framework that can be used to create software without the need to "code out" a solution. The framework itself would need to be coded, but the usage of the framework would not.

mrgoldenbrown• 14 years ago

If you limit yourself to the types of programs that were created before FORTRAN existed, then this might be true. But of course as capability increased, demand for more complicated program increased just as fast (or faster?)

koeselitz2• 14 years ago

Thankfully, they were right - it did. I've known a lot of C programmers, C++ programmers, Python programmers, and Java programmers; only a tiny handful of those programmers actually knew how to "code" (that is, write machine code.) FORTRAN, and the interpreted languages that came after it, really did "virtually eliminate coding and debugging."

FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging

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