Logic, Code, and the History of Programming

Astriking feature of the debates around the perceived software crisis in the 1960s and 1970s is the frank contempt expressed by some elite computer scientists for much work in the fields of programming and programming language design. The writings of computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra are a familiar source of such material: in his Turing Award lecture, he opined that “the sooner we can forget that FORTRAN ever existed the better” and likened an advocate of the PL/I language to a drug addict. In a slightly more restrained register, John Backus (another Turing Award winner) used his acceptance speech to denounce existing languages as “fat and flabby [2].” Dijkstra’s contempt for the tools of his trade easily slipped into contempt for their users.