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gramming principles were largely non-
existent [and] each problem required
a unique beginning at square one.”
1 It
was not clear to anyone in this period
what skills, training, or expertise were
required to make a good programmer.
It is no wonder, then, that corporate em-
ployers like IBM had difficulty identify-
ing potential programmer trainees, and
had to rely instead on vague notions of
“orderliness” and “imagination.”
What emerges over the course of
the next decade were a set of mech-
anisms for assuring an adequate
supply of well-trained, experienced
computer programmers. These in-
cluded the establishment of formal
programs in computer science, the
establishment of professional soci-
eties, the publication of journals (it
is no coincidence, for example, that
Communications of the ACM first ap-
peared in 1958). New technologies
were developed that made computer
programming less idiosyncratic, and
new languages were introduced to
help rationalize the process of pro-
gramming (the first FORTRAN com-
piler was delivered in 1957, and the
specification for COBOL was written
in 1959). By the late 1960s computing
was its own science, and proposals
for incorporation of “software engi-
neering” techniques were being de-
veloped. Employers such as IBM and
RCA no longer had to look to chess
players, musicians, and philosophers
to staff their programming projects.
Nevertheless, the sense that computer programming was, at least in
part, a distinctively creative activity,
and that the very best programmers
were gifted with a unique and idiosyncratic ability, remained a defining
feature of the discipline. Throughout
the 1960s and 1970s many corporate
recruiters continued to rely heavily
on the use of aptitude tests and personality tests aimed at identifying the
“twinkle in the eye,” the “indefinable
enthusiasm,” that marked those individuals possessed by “the programming bug that meant…we’re going to
take a chance on him despite his background.”
7 The IBM Programmer Aptitude Test (PAT), which had been developed by personnel psychologists in
1955 to help identify promising “
programmer types,” continued to be used
(albeit modified) well into the 1970s.
It has been estimated that as many as
80% of the employers working in the
field in that period had taken some
form of the IBM PAT.
Conclusion
The curious persistence, well beyond
the early, immature decades of electronic computing, of the notion that
good computer programmers are
“born, not made” can perhaps be interpreted as a sign of an ongoing lack
of intellectual or professional rigor
among programming personnel. But it
is more likely, and more justified by the
historical evidence, that the creative
tension between art and science in
computer programming has been one
of the keys to the enormous productivity of the programming community,
and to innovation in the software industry. In The Mythical Man-Month, for
example, Frederick Brooks famously
suggested that “the programmer, like
the poet, works only slightly removed
from pure-thought stuff. He builds his
castles in the air, from air, creating by
exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to
polish and rework, so readily capable
of realizing grand conceptual structures.”
2 Far from criticizing the notion
that programmers required a “lively
imagination,” Brooks was embracing
the fact. Like the IBM recruiters of an
earlier era, he was identifying in computer programming those intangible
qualities that made it one of the most
novel and intriguing of the new technical disciplines to emerge during the
great computer revolution of the mid-
20th century.
References
1. backus, J. Programming in america in the 1950s:
some personal impressions. In A History of
Computing in the Twentieth Century: A Collection of
Essays. n. Metropolis, J. howlett, and G-c. rota, eds.,
academic Press, ny, 1980, 125–135.
2. brooks, F.P. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on
Software Engineering. addison-wesley, ny, 1975, 20.
3. Gill, b. and logan, a. talk of the town. New Yorker 5
(Jan. 1957), 18–19.
4. halpern, M.I. Memoirs (Part 1). IEEE Annals of the
History of Computing 13, 1 (1991), 101–111.
5. IbM corporation. are you the man to command
electronic giants? New York Times (May 13, 1956).
6. rca corporation. deep enough for kant. 1962.
7. the computer Personnel research Group. Datamation
9, 1 (1963), 130.
nathan Ensmenger ( nathanen@sas.upenn.edu) is an
assistant professor at the university of Pennsylvania and
the author of The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers,
Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (MIt
Press, 2010).
copyright held by author.