A Compelling Image: The Tower of Babel and the Proliferation of Programming Languages During the 1960s

In 1961 and in 1969, two towers of Babel of programming languages were published. The first one appeared on the cover of Communications of the ACM. The second one appeared on Jean E. Sammet’s Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals. These two towers have come to symbolize the fragmentation that plagued the development of programming as a result of the multiplicity of notations. I will argue that contrary to this common view, the tower on the cover of Communications should be understood as a proud display of the research that profoundly transformed computer programming during the late 1950s. The tower of Sammet’s book reflected instead the book’s goal of bringing order into the field of programming languages. Symbolically, Sammet’s book marked the end of a decade that witnessed the emergence of a logico-linguistic approach to the study of programming notations, a decade that also spurred Sammet’s fascination with Babel.