Programming languages had multiplied into a Tower of Babel, and in 1969 Jean Sammet wrote their history
In 1969 Jean Sammet tried to put a proliferating field in order. The dust jacket drew the problem as a tower.
The story
Jean E. Sammet’s Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals (Prentice-Hall, 1969) compares the histories, designs and uses of the early high-level languages, among them COBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL and LISP. The record notes that she served on the committee that developed COBOL and directed IBM’s FORMAC project. The jacket’s Tower of Babel stands, in the record’s words, for the proliferation of competing programming systems. In the photograph the tower appears to be built from small labelled blocks.
This is a first edition, second printing: the number line ends in 2. Amarjit Singh of the University of Georgia’s physics department had it by June 1970, within a year of publication. The jacket shows rubbing, scuffs and small tears; the blue cloth beneath is clean and bright.
Details
- Date
- 1969
- Publisher
- Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey
- Edition
- First edition, second printing (number line ends with 2)
- Binding
- cloth: Bright blue gilt-lettered publisher's cloth with original illustrated dust jacket
- Condition
- Original blue pictorial dust jacket shows scattered rubbing, surface scuffs, minor tears and chips at corners/spine head and along the lower edge; blue gilt-stamped cloth boards appear clean, sound and bright. Inside front cover bears handwritten Amarjit Singh/University of Georgia Physics ownership inscription dated June 1970. Text appears clean from sampled pages. No complete collation or detailed page-by-page inspection performed.
- Inscription
- AMARJIT SINGH / DEPT. OF PHYSICS / UNIV. OF GEORGIA / ATHENS, GA. 30601 / JUNE 1970
- Interpretation
- Why someone in a physics department wanted a history of programming languages in 1970 is not something the record can tell us.