Free It Began with Babbage by Subrata Dasgupta Page A

to make the programming task “comprehensible.” 24
    By 1953/1954, the word
compiler
was being used to mean the kind of process required to translate programs written in algebraic form into machine code. 25 Indeed, Glennie’s AUTOCODE system, according to Knuth and Pardo, was the first implemented compiler that was actually used. 26
    It was this trend in thinking toward abstraction that led John Backus (1924–2007) and his team at IBM in New York to conceive and develop an automatic programming system around a language he called FORTRAN.
VI
    The FORTRAN (an abbreviation for FORmula TRANslator) project began in early 1954. Backus, a master’s degree holder in mathematics from Columbia University, joined IBM in 1950 as a programmer for one of their state-of-the-art electromechanical calculating machines. When the IBM 701 was built in 1953 (this the company’s first stored-program electronic computer), Backus led the development of an
interpretive
system for the 701 called Speedcode. 27 That is, a program written in Speedcode would be read an order (or statement) at a time, then translated automatically into the 701’s machine code and executed immediately. In other words, the orders (or statements) are interpreted one at a time.
    With the development of the IBM 704, IBM more or less came to monopolize the large-scale scientific computing arena. 28 Although the IBM 704 was not delivered until 1956, the FORTRAN project began in 1954 and was prompted by the planned advent of the 704. The idea was to design a language that would enable engineers and scientists to write programs themselves for the 704. The language of programming was to be “algebraic” or “formulaic” in form.
    This was not the only factor. In 1954, programming accounted for a very large portion—estimated at about three quarters—of the cost of operating a computer installation. 29 Automatic programming could help reduce this cost.
    The problem was that, in a culture in which programs were habitually written at virtually the level of a machine’s “native language” (that is, assembly language), there was “widespread skepticism” that an automatic programming system could produce machine code as efficient as “hand-coded” programs. 30 Backus and his group were, of course, acutely aware of this skepticism. They recognized that, for such a system to be accepted and used widely, they would have to demonstrate the comparative efficiency of programs produced by automatic systems. 31
    And so even though Backus’s group wanted a language to facilitate the scientist’s and engineer’s task of programming the 704, the design of the language itself became subservient to this imperative. The real problem, as they saw it, was to design a compiler that could produce efficient programs. The actual language design itself happened on the fly, so to speak—driven by the compiler imperative. 32
    As Backus would remember in 1981, the FORTRAN project seemed to defy the idea that all new ideas and inventions draw on prior ideas, and that something like what Arthur Koestler called
bisociation
worked to meld prior, possibly unrelated, concepts into something new (see Chapter 13 , Section IV). The closest automatic programming system (in broad philosophy) was the one developed for the MIT Whirlwind I by Laning and Zierler (as mentioned earlier). Although this system was, as Backus acknowledged, “the world’s first algebraic compiler” 33 and was completed before the first version of FORTRAN, it had apparently no influence on the design of FORTRAN. Nor, apparently, did any of the other related projects elsewhere, many of which Backus and his group were unaware. 34
VII
    The original goal was to design a language that, although algebraic or formulaic in form, was still tied to a particular computer, the IBM 704—that is, it would be a liminal computational artifact (see