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Home/Magazine Archive/November 2023 (Vol. 66, No. 11)/Lessons from PL/I: A Most Ambitious Programming Language/Abstract

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Lessons from PL/I: A Most Ambitious Programming Language

By Doug Meil
Communications of the ACM, November 2023, Vol. 66 No. 11, Pages 6-7
10.1145/3623564
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City of Cleveland Software Architect Doug Meil

https://bit.ly/44OqI2R July 5, 2023

One might argue language creation might be accelerating today, but it's not a new problem. In my BLOG@CACM post "Why are there so many programming languages?", I described how variants of programming languages go back to the dawn of computer programming. In that post I also cited one of my favorite stories: PL/I. PL/I stands for Programming Language 1, and its aim was to be the Highlander of programming languages: There would be no need for version 2, 3, or 4 if everything went to plan. While it is clear that goal was never reached, what might not be evident is that what PL/I was trying to achieve was a reasonable idea, or at least not entirely crazy. What also was not evident at the time was how difficult that reasonable idea turned out to be. We can all learn from this story.

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