The first decade of #programming: Speaking in tongues
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Speaking in Tongues: 1950–1960Part Two of Chapter One in a very personal #history of programmingSpeaking in tonguesIn 1957, FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) made it possible for people to write programs by composing with human logic instead of needing to remember difficult opcodes.The way human readable (and relatable) programming languages work is by taking a concept, such as printing out something, which as we saw just above takes a dozen lines of assembly code, and abstracting⁶ that concept into one reserved word. Reserved words are not the same as binary or hexadecimal words. Reserved words are human language code words that represent whole sentences in computer words. In the case of FORTRAN the reserved word that replaces most of the assembly program above is “write”.A special program (...)