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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 ( [e-mail]) 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.