Sankofa

Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham

While reading Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham, I stumbled upon his essay entitled “The Hundred-Year Language” which reminded me about my essay of the same title. I wrote this essay as an assignment for our Compiler Class back in College.

A Hundred Year Old Language

For almost one hundred years, humans have been writing computer programs. They had written it on almost all possible forms – from object code to a fifth-generation source code.

Object code, as we know it, is a collection of commands written as a binary string that can only be efficiently understood by a microprocessor. The first twenty years of computer programming history was written using object code – without it, computer science will never have existed. Throughout those fateful twenty years, early programmers have learned that writing object code is nasty, erroneous and time-consuming. There must be a better way to write computer programs, there should be a better way.

The solution came in the 1950’s in the form of an assembler. The assembler allowed the programmers to directly interact and instruct the computer via mnemonics – a microprocessor language. For the first time in computer history, humans are no longer bounded by ones and zeros – they are now able to write computer programs more intelligently. The assembler served as a catalyst for change because it allowed computer programs to be commercially feasible. For almost a decade, assemblers served their purpose; but the programmers soon realized that assemblers produced machine dependent application. Furthermore, optimization of an assembly code took more time than the actual development of the application. Simply put, majority of the programmers work are in the actual “writing” of the code and not in the actual “development” of the application. With that, the programmers needed an automated way to write their application – hence, the compiler was born.

Compiler revolutionized the way programmers write computer application. From that very crucial time in computer history, humans can now write computer application using their own natural language – thus, programming languages were born. With that, programmers can now develop application efficiently and effectively. Debuggers are also present to debug their application in an organized manner – hence increasing the quality of application produced. From then on, compilers have undergone major changes. Interpreters were added to allow the produced application to run on different processors via virtual machines. Profilers were added to optimize the source automatically on compile-time. Compilers fueled the Information Technology era because it allowed the programmer to write more complicated and complex codes without actually worrying on how the computer will execute it.

Today, compilers can be found hidden and embedded inside powerful IDEs. So the next time you press the F5 button to compile your program, think of the people that made the compiler. Because those people allowed us to convert our language to computer instructions, magically.