PL/1

Programming language, mighty descendant of Algol.

Dijkstra has this to say of PL/1 "Using PL/1 must be like flying a plane with 7, 000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language - our basic tool mind you! - already escapes our intellectual control."

"Another lesson we should have learned from the recent past is that development of "richer" or "more powerful" programming languages was a mistake in the sense that these baroque monstrosities, these conglomerations of idiosyncrasies, are really unmanageable both mechanically and mentally."

• E.W. Dijkstra, The humble programmer CACM Vol 15 No 18 Oct 1972

Flow-Matic

developed by a team around Grace Murray Hopper, the first English-language data-processing compiler.

In 1951 [12]:-

... she discovered the first computer "bug."¹ It was a real moth, which she pasted into the UNIVAC I logbook. In 1952 she had an operational compiler². "Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic." Hopper's reason for designing a compiler was, she wrote later, because she was lazy and hoped that the introduction of compilers would allow the computer programmer to return to being a mathematician. Further reading

¹ bug for a fault had been long used, it is a pun that with electronic computers for once more it was a real bug; ²A compiler as MS. Hopper meant it, was rather a library manager, linker and loader than how we think about it now. my annotations

Grace Murray Hopper

developed A0 and Flow-Matic early pioneer in HW-abstraction, mathematician, rear Admiral in the US Navy research, chiefest inventor of the compiler, imho

Grace M. Hopper entered the US Navy in 1943 to work for the Ordonance Computation Project at Harvard. There she worked with Howard Aiken on Harvard Mark I and was only the 3rd person to program it.

Afterwards she worked on the Harvard Mark II after the war. She then joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a Senior Mathematician in 1949, discovered the 1st computer "bug" finished Flow-Matic, the first English-language data-processing compiler in 1952:

"Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper retired from the Navy at age 80, the first woman to receive America's highest technology award as an individual.

www-groups.cs.st-and.ac.uk

Well now

I don't think weblogs are a question of finding time to do them but a question of wanting to communicate and what and how and to whom. Ich merk immer wieder, daß ich eigentlich gar nicht kommunizieren will oder aktuell insgesamt schon genug (wenigstens sprachlich) kommuniziert habe. That's why yesterday I wrote I shut up. I think if people feel they can't communicate they better shut up. Heute hab ich Zeit gefunden, mich wieder einmal mit ORF ON mobile zu beschäftigen und merk wie immer, ich kenn mich nur mehr zur Hälfte aus. Die Archiv DB der Montagesystem Sites ist ziemlich komisch und nicht so gut dokumentiert. Ausserdem verwende ich eine uralt Version des Helma Object Inspectors. Also aufräumen und weitermachen. Und nochmal: Wie groß ist der Bedarf danach?