Software II: Automating programming: Researchers are beginning to shift the growing burden of programming to the computer itself

Though some researchers consider radical changes in the way computers work to be essential to break the programming bottleneck, such an approach inevitably will take a number of years to bear fruit. In the meantime, others are working on more evolutionary approaches: leaving the computers as they are but automating the tedious job of programming them. In essence, these computer scientists are taking the development of programming languages one step further. Twenty years ago Fortran and other high-level languages were developed to enable programmers to generate many machine-language commands from fewer high-level instructions. Today's efforts are aimed at producing languages that will allow a simple statement about the purpose or behavior of a program to generate the entire high-level language algorithm to carry out the operations, thus eliminating the need for applications progammers.