When digital computers were invented, the first task was to instruct them to do what we wanted. The problem was that the machines didn’t understand English – they only knew ones and zeros. You could program them with long sequences of these two digits and if you got the sequence right then the machines would do what you wanted. But life’s too short for composing infinite strings of ones and zeros, so we began designing programming languages that allowed us to express our wishes in a human-readable form that could then be translated (by a piece of software called a “compiler”) into terms that machines could understand and obey.

Over the next 60 years or so, these programming languages – with names such as Fortran, Basic, Algol, COBOL, PL/1, LISP, C, C , Python – proliferated like rabbits, so that there are now many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of them. At any rate, it takes quite a while to scroll down to the end of the Wikipedia page that lists them. Some are very specialised, others more general, and over the years programmers created libraries of snippets of code (called subroutines) for common tasks – searching and sorting, for example – that you could incorporate when writing a particular program.

For more than half a century, therefore, an arcane, exclusive priesthood evolved, of people who had mastered one or more of these specialised........

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