praptak parent
Well, it did eliminate some kinds of coding (the part where human produces machine code from block diagrams) and debugging (the part where you look for errors in the above translation.)
Exactly. There are things that FORTRAN did right and that deserve to be studied even now:
http://groups.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/fort...
Just a day ago I've mentioned that the printf equivalent that existed in FORTRAN as early as 1956 was able to do the type checking of the parameters and the compile-time code generation, versus the run-time interpretation as in C's printf.
Yes, and the paper distinguishes between programming and coding. Step one is "Analysis and Programming", step two is "Coding." It's step two that FORTRAN virtually eliminates.
Correct. It's only because of the success of higher-level languages like FORTRAN that "coding" and "programming" came to mean the same thing. Before that, programming was part of the requirements.
We've become inured to silver-bullet bullshit in software, but it's an anachronism to think that about this report, which was dead right. In fact by subsequent standards their claim was rather modest. The full quote reads:
Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging, it should be possible to solve problems for less than half the cost that would be required without such a system.