My 1992 view of the problems of computer programming in 1992

While cleaning out my office today, I found this, which I wrote in 1992: In the middle 1970's, the IBM corporation did (and perhaps still does) most of their in-house programming in a computer language called FORTRAN. They had a pretty good FORTRAN compiler, called the FORTRAN G compiler. It was fast at translating FORTRAN into machine instructions, and the machine instructions it produced implemented the desired behavior fairly efficiently. Nevertheless, IBM decided to write a new compiler. This was very daring in the middle 1970's, because compilers were quite complicated programs, and are difficult to write, and it was surprising that IBM was willing to invest the vast resources that a new compiler would require when an adequate compiler was still available. IBM spent millions of dollars and hundreds of programmer-years, and produced the FORTRAN H compiler, which was fast, efficient, and full of nice features. It was an excellent compiler and is still the one that they use. Here is…