Free It Began with Babbage by Subrata Dasgupta Page B

Prologue, Section IV). That FORTRAN would evolve into a genuinely machine-independent (or, as the term would emerge,
high-level
) programming language, an abstract computational artifact—and arguably the first language with this characteristic—lends it a special place in the early history of computer science.
    But FORTRAN represented something more. Thus far in this story of programming languages, their design and the design of their translators belonged to the realm of what we may call
Little Science
. The work was done by one or two persons, reflecting almost entirely the creative spirit and ideas of these individuals—thus it was with Goldstine and von Neumann, with Wheeler, with Zuse and Rutihauser, with Böhm and Glennie, with Laning and Zierler.
    FORTRAN changed all of this. Much as the design of computers in the final years of the 1940s became, relatively speaking,
Big Science
, even in university settings. For example, at the time the Manchester Mark I was commissioned, the group led by FredericC. Williams had at least eight members 35 —so also “automatic programming” entered the realm of Big Science with the FORTRAN project. 36 A paper presented at a conference in Los Angeles in 1997 titled
The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System
had 13 coauthors. 37
    The size of the FORTRAN team was, of course, a symptom of the complexity of the project, and this complexity lay in that FORTRAN was a
system
comprised of a language, a computer program for automatic translation, a computer, a text, and a social community. Each of these components influenced, and was in turn influenced by, one or more of the other components.
    The FORTRAN language was designed, on the one hand, with an anxious eye toward its translatability into efficient IBM 704 machine code; and on the other, as a means of expressing algorithms in an algebraic form that would be “natural” to scientists and engineers, the intended users of the language. Thus, the acceptability of FORTRAN as a tool by the community of its potential users—the community of expected IBM 704 users and members of an IBM computers user group called SHARE, formed in 1955—depended both on the language as a vehicle for expressing algorithms
and
the efficiency of the executable machine code. The designers of the translator (compiler) bore responsibility of ensuring that FORTRAN programs could be translated automatically into IBM 704 machine code that would compare favorably in efficiency with “hand-coded” programs. If the FORTRAN language was the interface between the user community and an IBM 704 installation, the FORTRAN compiler was the interface between the language and the 704 machine itself.
    Strictly speaking, the FORTRAN language was one part of the user community–704 installation interface. The user had to learn the language; a
text
was needed that would describe the language—a programmer’s guide to FORTRAN. Like any endeavor that created practical artifacts for human use, the FORTRAN project entailed a melding of objective principles of design with subjective perceptions and beliefs—mathematics, logic, design principles fused with psychology.
VIII
    The FORTRAN language design began in early 1954. Before the year’s end, a preliminary 29-page report on the language was written 38 and distributed to prospective IBM 704 customers. 39 Armed more with faith than empirical evidence (as Backus confessed) the authors of the report, in their introduction, assured readers that FORTRAN programs would not only execute as efficiently as “laboriously” hand-coded programs would, but also that FORTRAN would facilitate the production of much more complex programs than could be hand coded. 40
    Here, “FORTRAN” meant not the language but the translator; “coding” referred not to the act of writing programs in the FORTRAN language, but to the process of producing machine code automatically by the