Culture of Programming

Programming language research does not exist in isolation. Many programming languages are designed to address a particular business problem or as a reflection of more wide-ranging shifts in the computing community. Histories of individual programming languages often take their own contexts for granted, which makes it difficult to connect the dots and understand the history of programming in a holistic way. This paper documents the broader socio-technological context that shapes programming languages. To structure our discussion, we introduce the idea of a culture of programming which embodies a particular perspective on programming. We identify four major cultures: hacker culture, engineering culture, managerial culture and mathematical culture. To understand how the cultures interact and influence the design of programming languages, we look at a number of historical strands in four lectures that comprise this paper. We follow the mathematization of programming, the development of types, discussion on fundamental limits of complex software systems and the methods that help make modern software acceptably reliable.