Tony Brooker, Pioneer of Computer Programming, Dies At 94 (nytimes.com) 26
Cade Metz from The New York Times pays tribute to Tony Brooker, the mathematician and computer scientist who designed the programming language for the world's first commercial computer. Brooker died on Nov. 20 at the age of 94. From the report: Mr. Brooker had been immersed in early computer research at the University of Cambridge when one day, on his way home from a mountain-climbing trip in North Wales, he stopped at the University of Manchester to tour its computer lab, which was among the first of its kind. Dropping in unannounced, he introduced himself to Alan Turing, a founding father of the computer age, who at the time was the lab's deputy director. When Mr. Brooker described his own research at the University of Cambridge, he later recalled, Mr. Turing said, "Well, we can always employ someone like you." Soon they were colleagues.
Mr. Brooker joined the Manchester lab in October 1951, just after it installed a new machine called the Ferranti Mark 1. His job, he told the British Library in an interview in 2010, was to make the Mark 1 "usable." Mr. Turing had written a user's manual, but it was far from intuitive. To program the machine, engineers had to write in binary code -- patterns made up of 0s and 1s -- and they had to write them backward, from right to left, because this was the way the hardware read them. It was "extremely neat and very clever but pretty meaningless and very unfriendly," Mr. Brooker said. In the months that followed, Mr. Brooker wrote a language he called Autocode, based on ordinary numbers and letters. It allowed anyone to program the machine -- not just the limited group of trained engineers who understood the hardware. This marked the beginning of what were later called "high-level" programming languages -- languages that provide increasingly simple and intuitive ways of giving commands to computers, from the IBM mainframes of the 1960s to the PCs of the 1980s to the iPhones of today.
Mr. Brooker joined the Manchester lab in October 1951, just after it installed a new machine called the Ferranti Mark 1. His job, he told the British Library in an interview in 2010, was to make the Mark 1 "usable." Mr. Turing had written a user's manual, but it was far from intuitive. To program the machine, engineers had to write in binary code -- patterns made up of 0s and 1s -- and they had to write them backward, from right to left, because this was the way the hardware read them. It was "extremely neat and very clever but pretty meaningless and very unfriendly," Mr. Brooker said. In the months that followed, Mr. Brooker wrote a language he called Autocode, based on ordinary numbers and letters. It allowed anyone to program the machine -- not just the limited group of trained engineers who understood the hardware. This marked the beginning of what were later called "high-level" programming languages -- languages that provide increasingly simple and intuitive ways of giving commands to computers, from the IBM mainframes of the 1960s to the PCs of the 1980s to the iPhones of today.
Whats old is new again (Score:1)
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Re:Whats old is new again (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I look at Java, and think, 70 years later we have not gone forward at all, and still patent spats on concepts known - 70 years ago.
"The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques that put them into practice, the more is my amazement at and admiration of ALGOL 60. Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors".
- C.A.R. Hoare, "Hints on Programming Language Design", 1973
Farewell (Score:4, Informative)
Also, this is yet another reminder to people that C is not "low level" programming. C/C++ are high level programming languages.
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High and low are relative. C is vastly different from programming in raw assembler, and C++, despite the superficial similarity, is at another level from C.
Maybe we should call C "medium level".
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Stop spewing your ignorance. C and C++ are not even the same level, one does have high level constructs such as objects, inheritance, and templates.
C on the other hand is a low level language.
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High level does not refer to the sophistication of a language, it refers to whether or not it is an abstraction of machine language.
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Yet you are ignorant. I have more than 30 years in each too.
C is very close to the operations a computer does, I've been doing mainframe to micro assembly since the 70s
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"C is very close to the operations a computer does"
Which isn't a relevant consideration. It is an abstraction of machine code and therefore a high level language.
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assembly is an abstraction of machine code, are you going to claim that's high level too? bullshit.
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Exactly this.
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C and C++ are inarguably high level languages.
And one is 'higher' than the other. Java is at another level. Even though they're all third generation languages, they have differences that matter. Low versus high is a limited, in some ways deficient, method of categorizing languages.
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Low vs high isn't a particularly meaningful way of categorizing modern languages at all. They are all high. It isn't a scale, either the language contains human readable abstraction or it is machine code, with the former being high and the latter being low. If you are coding in C the compiler is providing the low level code. Which is the gist of my point, all these debates about high vs low languages are pointless and flawed from the get go because they incorrectly use the term.
Re:Farewell (Score:5, Informative)
Also, this is yet another reminder to people that C is not "low level" programming. C/C++ are high level programming languages.
Asking if C is a high level language is like asking if an ant is large, depends on whether you're comparing it to whales or bacteria. Of course C is a high level language in the sense that it does things like print text instead of setting individual pixels which is not a "native" function of the computer. I feel it's more like a float between 0 and 1 where 0 is "add registry A and registry B, put it in registry C" and 1 is "I want a program to do my taxes" and it'll figure out the rest. I would say most computer languages are maybe like 0.01-0.1 on that scale.
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Can anyone verify - and, if so, cite a reliable source - for the story I remember about Turing's very RISCy attitude to hardware design?
As I recall, he wrote something along the lines of, "If the programmers want high-level constructs like addition and subtraction, let them write subroutines. All they are getting from me is 'logical and' and 'logical or'".
It does seem to have the authentic tone. Apologies if I have rephrased anachronistically.
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If it is a language, it is high level. Assembly code is considered low level because it is merely translated to machine code but an argument could be made that it is a high level human readable abstraction as well. C is very much a high level language even if it possible to encapsulate low level instructions within it.
"To program the machine, engineers had to write in binary code -- patterns made up of 0s and 1s -- and they had to write them backward, from right to left, because this was the way the hardwar
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No, C is the highest of the low level langauges, but are not a high level languages.
Very ignorant to put C++ next to it in the same sentence when talking about low and high level languages.
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Both are abstractions from machine code and therefore both are high. The entire debate of high vs low is an incorrect usage of terms, there is no low to high scale, the language is either machine code (low) or an abstraction (high). If you are coding in C or any other compiled language your compiler/linker are the ones producing low level code.
... the iPhones of today. (Score:4, Insightful)
Except you can't program them anymore as a end user, and they hence are not computers but appliances to you.
Only the manufacturer can.
And contractors (app developers) that are approved to build modules. As long as they are fixed-function and do not allow programmability. (Literally a rule.)
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You can program an iPhone all you want. There used to be a $99/year fee, but it's been free for years.
So you can't. Let alone your buddy. (Score:2)
No, you can only write a locked-down module. You cannot change anything else. Not other apps, not the OS, nor the bootloader.
And even that isolated module won't go on your buddy's iPhone, because he refuses to buy a $90 letter of indulgence, just to use the damn thing he supposedly already bought, that supposeldy was a computer, as an actual damn computer!
It is in the category of appliances. I can repair or program modules for a gadget or a car or a kitchen appliance too, if I shell out enough money for a s
Correction: Misread the last part. (Score:2)
Sorry, my bad.
Still, you have to get a special letter of indulgence.
And make no mistake: It is only free because it was free for Android.
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"Letter of indulgence."
Lol. Give him the code. It's a free software advocate's wet dream: it will *only* run source code you compile yourself (unless you pay).
Phones, including Android, are locked down quite a bit. Whether that's a good thing or not is a matter of opinion. That doesn't change the fact that your statement that you cannot program an iPhone is incorrect. What you're doing is called "moving the goalposts".
Kateryna Yushchenko (Score:2)
In 1955 Kateryna Yushchenko also developed a higher programming language.
Yushchenko is best known for her creation of Address programming language - the first fundamental advancement in the scientific school of theoretical programming. This language provided the free location of a program in computer memory.
Early on it became clear that the more complex computer tasks were difficult to solve by writing simple machine programs. There was a need to develop a high-level programming language, but there was a pr