English commands and keywords in programming
I've been curious about a particular question for sometime. After reading the works of various authours in the history of computing field, I directed my questions to the authours. I was then made aware of the SIGCIS. To the question... How did the English language become the "default" language for computer programming. Why do Python, C, C++, ALGOL, Java, COBOL etc. borrow their natural language commands from English? I am especially curious about the way this came about after the Second World War. The era of the cold-war seems to have presented an opportunity for states like the USSR, East/West Germany and the Scandinavian countries to benefit from pushing an international (or national) language for programming.I am curious to know what members of this group think of this question? Some further questions include - Why did ALGOL's implementation (despite its 3 levels of description) not accommodate the diversity of linguistic representation of those who subsequently participated in developing it? I am curious to know if IBM's SHARE user group's hesitation to ALGOL may have resulted in how it was received globally. I imagine that standards (or idiosyncratic practices) also played a part in this process and I wonder how that may have occurred? Finally Grace Hopper's speech in Wexelblat's ACM's History of Programming Languages, implied that COBOL's success came from work she did showing that an interpreter could help in compiling the multi-lingual expressions of the same commands. Again why did this not become the reality of contemporary "mainstream" programming? Any clues would be helpful. Thank you. Sincerely, Eji Mimiko.
There was an excellent talk that touched on some of these issues at SIGCIS 2017, Command Lines, from Ramsey Nasser, Independent Computer Scientist. I believe you can find the video online. —S. — S a r a h T. R o b e r t s, P h. D. Assistant Professor Co-Director, UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry University of California, Los Angeles Department of Information Studies Graduate School of Education & Information Studies https://is.gseis.ucla.edu/ Behind the Screen (Yale University Press) https://www.behindthescreen-book.com/ **Please note: I’m increasingly finding email unmanageable. If I don’t respond and your issue is urgent, please resend and indicate that in the subject line. Your message likely just got lost in the shuffle. Thanks.
I can’t fully answer your question, but I can point to the source materials I’ve gathered relating to the Algol standardization track (International Algorithmic Language/Algol 58, Algol 60, and Algol 68): http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/standards/ . While the earliest European documents were in German, starting with the 1958 Zurich meeting that produced the Preliminary Report onward English seems to have been adopted as the basis for Algol. Algol was supposed to be "as close as possible to standard mathematical notation” so in some sense they seem to have been focussed on the operators, brackets, and so on, although there were of course a set of reserved words. Another data point is Fortran, designed by Americans and using English keywords. There was a French edition of the original language reference manual, and the keywords were in French: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/102663111.05.01.a... — I don’t know if IBM continued to maintain a French version. Other early, influential languages designed in English-speaking countries included COBOL and LISP. I can only speculate that software producers and consumers in non English-speaking countries decided the benefits of using a native language were outweighed by disadvantages such as the difficulty of “internationalizing” the software itself and the difficulty of sharing source code from elsewhere. Paul McJones
On Aug 2, 2019, at 8:19 PM, Eji Layo <ejilayomi@gmail.com> wrote:
I've been curious about a particular question for sometime. After reading the works of various authours in the history of computing field, I directed my questions to the authours. I was then made aware of the SIGCIS. To the question...
How did the English language become the "default" language for computer programming. Why do Python, C, C++, ALGOL, Java, COBOL etc. borrow their natural language commands from English? I am especially curious about the way this came about after the Second World War. The era of the cold-war seems to have presented an opportunity for states like the USSR, East/West Germany and the Scandinavian countries to benefit from pushing an international (or national) language for programming.I am curious to know what members of this group think of this question?
Some further questions include - Why did ALGOL's implementation (despite its 3 levels of description) not accommodate the diversity of linguistic representation of those who subsequently participated in developing it? I am curious to know if IBM's SHARE user group's hesitation to ALGOL may have resulted in how it was received globally. I imagine that standards (or idiosyncratic practices) also played a part in this process and I wonder how that may have occurred? Finally Grace Hopper's speech in Wexelblat's ACM's History of Programming Languages, implied that COBOL's success came from work she did showing that an interpreter could help in compiling the multi-lingual expressions of the same commands. Again why did this not become the reality of contemporary "mainstream" programming? Any clues would be helpful. Thank you.
Sincerely, Eji Mimiko.
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
I can suggest one general reason for the use of English, not based on particular knowledge of these programming languages. International standardization through ISO and IEC (the two international and non-governmental standard setting bodies at that time) was officially done in English and French. The IEC (international Electrotechnical Commission) had used the two languages since its founding in 1906. After World War II, the Soviet Union got the newly formed ISO to list Russian as a third official language, but only by agreeing to do all translation into Russian itself. Russian was not used for the original standards themselves. Throughout the Cold War, engineers from both sides of the Iron curtain participated in ISO standard setting meetings, which were held in Eastern Bloc countries as well as in the west, but always in English and/or French. The ACM also participated in such national and international voluntary standard setting, in English. These language norms for technical standardization were surely one reason for the choice of English for computer languages. Discussion of international voluntary standard setting (as well as some discussion of early standard setting around computers and software) can be found in our new book, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting Since 1880 (John’s Hopkins Press, 2019), by JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy. JoAnne Yates Sent from my iPad On Aug 3, 2019, at 8:03 PM, Paul McJones <paul@mcjones.org<mailto:paul@mcjones.org>> wrote: I can’t fully answer your question, but I can point to the source materials I’ve gathered relating to the Algol standardization track (International Algorithmic Language/Algol 58, Algol 60, and Algol 68): http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/standards/ . While the earliest European documents were in German, starting with the 1958 Zurich meeting that produced the Preliminary Report onward English seems to have been adopted as the basis for Algol. Algol was supposed to be "as close as possible to standard mathematical notation” so in some sense they seem to have been focussed on the operators, brackets, and so on, although there were of course a set of reserved words. Another data point is Fortran, designed by Americans and using English keywords. There was a French edition of the original language reference manual, and the keywords were in French: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/102663111.05.01.a... — I don’t know if IBM continued to maintain a French version. Other early, influential languages designed in English-speaking countries included COBOL and LISP. I can only speculate that software producers and consumers in non English-speaking countries decided the benefits of using a native language were outweighed by disadvantages such as the difficulty of “internationalizing” the software itself and the difficulty of sharing source code from elsewhere. Paul McJones On Aug 2, 2019, at 8:19 PM, Eji Layo <ejilayomi@gmail.com<mailto:ejilayomi@gmail.com>> wrote: I've been curious about a particular question for sometime. After reading the works of various authours in the history of computing field, I directed my questions to the authours. I was then made aware of the SIGCIS. To the question... How did the English language become the "default" language for computer programming. Why do Python, C, C++, ALGOL, Java, COBOL etc. borrow their natural language commands from English? I am especially curious about the way this came about after the Second World War. The era of the cold-war seems to have presented an opportunity for states like the USSR, East/West Germany and the Scandinavian countries to benefit from pushing an international (or national) language for programming.I am curious to know what members of this group think of this question? Some further questions include - Why did ALGOL's implementation (despite its 3 levels of description) not accommodate the diversity of linguistic representation of those who subsequently participated in developing it? I am curious to know if IBM's SHARE user group's hesitation to ALGOL may have resulted in how it was received globally. I imagine that standards (or idiosyncratic practices) also played a part in this process and I wonder how that may have occurred? Finally Grace Hopper's speech in Wexelblat's ACM's History of Programming Languages, implied that COBOL's success came from work she did showing that an interpreter could help in compiling the multi-lingual expressions of the same commands. Again why did this not become the reality of contemporary "mainstream" programming? Any clues would be helpful. Thank you. Sincerely, Eji Mimiko. _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://sigcis.org>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://sigcis.org>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
I don't have any answers to this question, but here's a minor but hopefully interesting point on a related topic... Developers catering for mainly British and Commonwealth audiences were occasionally faced with the decision as to whether to implement particular terms in British English, or in the US English that was usually the basis of any existing precedent. This was notably the case for the keyword COLOR/COLOUR in some implementations of the Basic language for 8-bit microcomputers in the 1980s, colour graphics being at that time largely a matter of platform-specific hardware capabilities and thus entirely unstandardised. Of the major British-originated platforms, both the Sinclair Spectrum and Amstrad CPC series had platform-specific Basic dialects which managed to avoid the issue entirely using alternative terms such as INK – I don't know whether by coincidence or design. The Dragon series simply used COLOR: its Basic was apparently an almost unmodified implementation of the Microsoft-originated Extended Color Basic. The spelling COLOUR was, however, used for the BBC Microcomputer series, developed by Acorn for the national public broadcaster's Computer Literacy Project and widely used in British schools. Originally, COLOR was not recognised and would result in an error message. In 1983, with Acorn making an (ultimately abortive) effort to break into the American market, one of the very few changes between versions 2 and 3 of BBC Basic was to accept COLOR interchangeably with COLOUR. Since keywords were stored internally as tokens rather than in full text, this resulted in a trivial but practical example of automated international translation. Whichever spelling the programmer used, the command to LIST the program would show COLOUR consistently on the default installation and COLOR on the US export model. All best James On 03/08/2019 04:19, Eji Layo wrote:
I've been curious about a particular question for sometime. After reading the works of various authours in the history of computing field, I directed my questions to the authours. I was then made aware of the SIGCIS. To the question...
How did the English language become the "default" language for computer programming. Why do Python, C, C++, ALGOL, Java, COBOL etc. borrow their natural language commands from English? I am especially curious about the way this came about after the Second World War. The era of the cold-war seems to have presented an opportunity for states like the USSR, East/West Germany and the Scandinavian countries to benefit from pushing an international (or national) language for programming.I am curious to know what members of this group think of this question?
Some further questions include - Why did ALGOL's implementation (despite its 3 levels of description) not accommodate the diversity of linguistic representation of those who subsequently participated in developing it? I am curious to know if IBM's SHARE user group's hesitation to ALGOL may have resulted in how it was received globally. I imagine that standards (or idiosyncratic practices) also played a part in this process and I wonder how that may have occurred? Finally Grace Hopper's speech in Wexelblat's ACM's History of Programming Languages, implied that COBOL's success came from work she did showing that an interpreter could help in compiling the multi-lingual expressions of the same commands. Again why did this not become the reality of contemporary "mainstream" programming? Any clues would be helpful. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Eji Mimiko.
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
participants (5)
-
Eji Layo -
James Sumner -
JoAnne Yates -
Paul McJones -
Roberts, Sarah