Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

386 programming as a professioncalculations. Although practical electronic computers firstbegan to be built in the 1940s, it took considerable time forprogramming to emerge as a distinct profession. The firstprogrammers were the computer designers themselves, followedby people (often women) recruited from clerical personswho were good at mathematics. With machines likeENIAC, programming was more like setting up a complicatedpiece of factory machinery than like writing. Switchesor plugboards had to be set, and numeric instruction codespunched on cards to instruct the machine to move eachpiece of data from one location to another or to perform anarithmetic or logical operation.Two factors led to greater recognition for the art or craftof programming. First, as more computers were built andput to work for various purposes, more programmers wereneeded, as well as more attention to their training and management.Second, as programs became larger and more complex,a number of high-level languages such as COBOL andFORTRAN came into use (see programming languages).Besides making it easier to write programs, having just afew languages in widespread use made skills more readilytransferable from one computer installation to another. Andas with any profession, programming developed bodies ofknowledge and practice.At the same time, advances in language developmentwould raise a recurrent question: Are professional programmersreally necessary? Since FORTRAN looked a lot likeordinary mathematical notation, couldn’t scientists andengineers just write the programs they need without hiringspecialists for the job? Similarly, some enthusiasts ledmanagers to think that with COBOL accountants (or evenmanagers) could write their own business programs.Sometimes part-time or “amateur” programming didprove to be practicable, particularly for scientists who foundthat writing a quick FORTRAN routine to solve a problemwas easier than trying to explain the problem to a professionalprogrammer. However, the professional programmer’sjob was never really in danger. Businesspeople wereless inclined to try to learn COBOL and entrust somethinglike the company’s payroll processing to ad hoc efforts. Inaddition, the programs that controlled the operation of thecomputer itself, which became known as operating systems,required both arcane knowledge and the ability to design,verify, test, and debug increasingly complex systems (seesoftware engineering).Development of PracticeIn response to this growing complexity, computer scientistsapproached the improvement of programming practice onseveral levels. New languages developed in the 1960s and1970s featured well-defined control structures, data types,and procedure calls (see Algol, Pascal, C, data types,loop, and structured programming.) The managementof programming teams and the factors affecting productivitywere examined by pioneers such as Frederick Brooks,author of The Mythical Man-Month, and IBM sponsoredworkshops and study groups.While many mainframe business programmers continuedto write and maintain programs written in the olderlanguages (such as COBOL), starting in the 1970s a newgeneration of systems and applications programmers usedC and worked in a different environment—campus minicomputersrunning UNIX. Unlike the hierarchical, systematicapproach of the “mainframe culture,” the minicomputerprogrammers tended toward a decentralized but cooperativeapproach (see open-source movement and hackersand hacking).When the personal computer revolution began to arriveat the end of the 1970s, much of the evolution of programmingculture would be recapitulated. Since early microcomputersystems had very limited memory, programmerswho wanted to get useful work out of machines such as theApple II had to work mainly in assembly language or writequick and dirty programs in a limited dialect of BASIC. Thehobbyists and early adopters often knew little about theacademic world of computer science and software engineering,but they were good at wringing the most out of eachclock cycle and byte of memory.As personal computers gained in power and capabilitythrough the 1980s, programmers were able to use higherlevellanguages such as C. Applications such as word processors,spreadsheets, and graphics programs became morecomplex, and programmers had to work in larger teams liketheir mainframe counterparts.At the same time, the sharp demarcation between programmerand user became less distinct with the personalcomputer. Many users who were not professional programmersused applications software that included programmablefeatures, such as spreadsheets and simple data bases (seemacro and scripting language). New languages such asVisual Basic let even relatively inexperienced programmersplug in user interfaces and other components and createuseful programs (see programming environment).Each sector of programming seems to go through acycle of improvisation and innovation followed by standardizationand professionalization. Just as the earlyENIAC programmers evolved into the organized hierarchyof corporate programming departments, the individualsand small groups who wrote the first personal computersoftware evolved into large teams using sophisticated softwareto track to the modules, versions, and developmentsteps of major programming projects. Similarly, when theexplosion of the World Wide Web starting in the mid-1990sbrought a new demand for people who could code HTML,CGI, and Java, much of the most interesting work was doneby individuals and small companies. But if history repeatsitself, the Internet applications field will undergo the sameprocess of professionalization, with increasingly elaboratestandards and expectations (see certification of computerprofessionals).Throughout the history of programming, visionarieshave announced that the time was coming when most ifnot all programming could be automated. All a person willhave to do is give a reasonably coherent description of thedesired results and the required program will be coded bysome form of artificial intelligence (see expert systems,genetic algorithms, and neural network). But whileusers have now been given the ability to do many things