Tool Fantasyland
For decades, tool vendors and industry pundits have promised that the tools needed to eliminate programming are just over the horizon. The first, and perhaps most ironic, tool to receive this moniker was Fortran. Fortran or "Formula Translation Language" was conceived so that scientists and engineers could simply type in formulas, thus supposedly eliminating the need for programmers.
Cross-Reference
Tool availability depends partly on the maturity of the technical environment. For more on this, see Your Location on the Technology Wave.
Fortran did succeed in making it possible for scientists and engineers to write programs, but from our vantage point today, Fortran appears to be a comparatively lowlevel programming language. It hardly ...
Get Code Complete, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
