My 1992 view of the problems of computer programming in 1992 (opens in new tab)

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. ...