A science of operations. Machines, logic and the invention of programming. (Q625111)

This history of computer programming through the 1970s emphasizes interactions with logic. Previous historical accounts often argued or assumed that the modern computer and programming were developed as applications of theoretical work in modern logic, even characterizing the electronic computer as a logic machine. The author, however, observes that even for such a seminal step as the stored program in the 1940s, the evidence is weak or non-existent that logic was even the prime influence. Algol 60, for another example, developed in the 1960s, is properly pictured as the beginning of the explicit involvement of logic in the form of program formalization. It is also pictured as marking the rise of a paradigm characterizing a research program within which many subsequent developments took place. The stages of development represented here include Lisp and recursion, structured programming, and object oriented language. (Other languages, such as those aiming to emulate natural language, are not overlooked in the account.) Even with this increased involvement of logic and in spite of the influence of Turing, it is pointed out that it was not a simple case of drawing straightforward consequences for programming languages, but a series of research-based choices about how to understand and structure those languages. Starting with the desire to automate computation and control by means of computers, the author surveys the various motivations for the development of programming languages. In addition to the topics mentioned above, the story includes Charles Babbage's engines from the nineteenth century, Konrad Zuse's machines, the role of Von Neumann's designs in the 1940s, formal language development (Alfred Tarski and Rudolf Carnap), Fortran, Smalltalk, and an appendix on Turings universal machine.