"Sooner or later our attitude should not be that people should have to learn how to code for the computer. The computer should “learn how to respond to people" - Grace Hopper
The programmers of FORTRAN were an eclectic bunch: a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, an employee loaned from United Aircraft, a researcher from MIT, and a young woman (Lois Haibt) who joined the project straight out of Vassar, and was the only woman on the ten person team. The selected those who they felt had a high affinity for problem solving.
The leader of the FORTRAN team, John Backus, was aiming far higher than the level of an assembly language. Each line of assembly code translated into one instruction of binary machine code. For the assembly programmers of the 1950s, programming was a one-line-at-a-time craft. Backus wanted to break through the one-to-one arithmetic of programming so that one line written by a human might translate into many machine instructions. His plan, if successful, would bring not just a technological advance to computing, but a certain cultural shift as well.
FORTRAN: The Formula Translator
Others were pursuing the same goal, hoping to make computing less dependent on the programming priesthood. Perhaps the most outspoken advocate for change was Grace Hopper. Hopper spoke frequently at computer gatherings to marshal support for what she called “automatic programming.” Under that banner, she grouped several software tools. She wrote an automatic programming system for the UNIVAC that stitched together pieces of code into a single program, and she called it the A-O compiler.
The A-O compiler was the first compiler ever developed for an electronic computer. Her compiler could take mathematical code and automatically translate it into machine language for use by the computer. Without her work and contributions, FORTRAN could not have succeeded as a programming language in its goal of advancing the user and machine relationship.
The First Compiler
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