Increased frustration and slower productivity are common as
a technology matures. It was equally true of the technology that preceded today's
procedural development methods. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, most computer
programs basically consisted of a long list of instructions and data. The
processor would start at the beginning of the list, follow all the instructions,
and output a result. This worked well for solving problems such as preparing a
payroll or performing a series of complex calculations, but not for other tasks
that people wanted computers to perform. As the hardware became more
sophisticated and more powerful, this kind of programming also became
increasingly difficult for programmers, who often wrote programs in relatively
low-level languages or even assembly language.
These frustrations led to some dramatic changes in programming techniques. Within
a few years, high-level procedural languages and structured programming
techniques, previously the domain of academics and a few teams of researchers,
achieved general acceptance in the marketplace. Rather than writing a list of
arcane instructions for the machine to read from top to bottom, programmers could
work in higher-level languages that made it easier to work with logical
abstractions such as loops and data structures.
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