went on to publish A Guide to FORTRAN ProgrammingFormula translation (FORTRAN) with Wiley in 1961, a textbook that eventually sold 300,000 copies. This title has been described as the first-bestselling book for programmers in the U.S., an achievement related to McCracken’s acumen as a writer, Wiley’s skillful marketing, and the emergence of FORTRAN as the standard high-level language. McCracken described the magical combination several years later: “Walker Stone saw it, convinced management, and I just turned all possible effort to getting a FORTRAN book out fast before anybody else got the idea. I wrote that book in under six months.”30
McCracken’s FORTRAN tutorial came in at just 88 pages, and it was published in a flexible workbook format (8.5” × 11”) to encourage student use and allow for propping the book open in front of a computer terminal. The textbook’s success contributed to the rising tide of FORTRAN books, broadening its appeal. McCracken also made programming seem interesting and approachable, distinguishing his author voice from that of the FORTRAN manual. Ken Thompson (see Figure Thompson, Ken10.1), the creator of Unix, later described the importance of learning FORTRAN in this way: “95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without FORTRAN. It was a massive step.”Unix31 Over time, FORTRAN dramatically increased the productivity of America’s engineering teams (see Figure 3.10).
But McCracken wasn’t finished. By the end of the 1970s, McCracken had become the author or co-author of over two dozen computer books which sold more than 1.6 million copies and were translated into 15 languages. He served as Vice President of the ACM from 1976 to 1978, and President of the ACM from 1978 to 1980. Although his work had an important impact on corporate and scientific computing, his commitment to social issues was equally significant. For example, he led an effort to develop social statements on the Vietnam War, the Equal Rights Amendment, human rights, and privacy issues.32 Considering his legacy as a bestselling author of computer titles, the New York Times simply described McCracken as the “Steven King of how-to Daniel McCracken’s primersprogramming books.”33 What is less well known is that McCracken used a portion of his royalties to fly around the country advocating for political and social issues.34 It was a furtive period of change in which peace activists mixed with research scientists, authors, and programmers.
Figure 3.10An engineering team at Digital Equipment Corporation pose in this undated photo. FORTRAN’s success dramatically increased the productivity of development groups.Formula translation (FORTRAN) (Courtesy of the Computer History Museum and DEC)
How broad was the appeal of the nascent learn-to-program movement? Daniel McCracken’s primers
The ACM was an active participant from the start. In 1961, ACM luminary Alan Perlis offered what may have been the first Perlis, Alanuniversal appeal for college students to learn how to program. Perlis suggested that all university freshmen take a programming class at the Carnegie Technical Institute to learn about computers and how they operated. His article, “The role of the digital computer in the university,” was published in the popular technical journal, Computers and Automation.35 Although Perlis preferred ALGOL, a concise high-level language that he co-developed, he was less interested in syntax and more interested in the patterns of computational Algorithmic Language (ALGOL)thinking. Professor Perlis was highly influential in how Computer Science was introduced in the universities, and his advice counted. He went on to join the ACM Computing Curriculum Committee, an influential standards body that proposed the first curriculum standards for Computer Science education in the mid-1960. The ACM also formed the Special Interest Group on Computers and Society (1969) in part to advocate for computer literacy.
3.6Logodesign by Seymour PapertSeymour Papert and Logo
Through FORTRAN, programming instruction became one avenue into the world of computing in the 1960s, encouraged by the rising tide of primers and other Papert, Seymourmaterials. But not everyone agreed on which learning system should be used or what computational literacy might entail in schools. Moreover, the growing accessibility of computers brought up intellectual and philosophical questions. Might computational thinking be valuable for its own sake, outside of professional contexts? Might learning to code support cognitive development in children and adults? What, ultimately, was the purpose of programming instruction?
At MIT, an innovative group of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers began to propose intriguing answers. Their efforts would produce not only a new programming language, but educational strategies that would profoundly influence how Americans taught programming for years to come. The leader of this group was Seymour Papert (1928–2016), a mathematician and psychologist who co-founded MIT’s AI laboratory with Marvin Minsky (1927–2016). Papert co-developed the Logo programming language and launched what became known as the constructionist movement in science education. Artificial intelligence (AI)AI.Artificial intelligence (AI)Constructionist movement in science education
After receiving a Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (1959), Papert studied for 5 years with psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) at the Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva, Switzerland. Papert came away impressed by Piaget’s way of seeing children as active builders of their own intellectual structures. Papert came to believe that children readily used the materials that they found about them to learn, and that these tools were most efficacious when they were a regular part of the surrounding culture.36 For Papert, such a tool could be the computer, if it could be adapted to the educational aims of teachers and the natural experience of students.
Papert and his colleagues began to ask important new questions about learning to use computers in public settings. How might computers affect the way that people think and learn? Can computers be carriers of powerful ideas and the seeds of cultural change? How can computers help people form new relationships with knowledge that cut across the traditional lines separating science from the humanities? Can people of all ages learn computing principles? If the goal of teaching about computers is cognitive development, what is the ideal age to start young children?
Papert was particularly interested in using computer programming to enhance cognitive development. However, the psychologist was unimpressed with the way that people were learning programming skills in his day, and he believed that the current crop of programming tools and primers were only suited for adults. A mathematician by training, Papert believed that computers could revolutionize math instruction if coding tasks were more naturally connected to a child’s developmental impulses. His MIT group responded by creating Logo, a high-level language and system that utilized visual output (computer graphics) and automated devices (robotics) to teach programming. The Logo language was co-developed by Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon, and Wally Feurzeig in 1966, and the system made its debut in Cambridge, Massachusetts Feurzeig, Wallythe following year. Within a decade, Logo became the leading educational computer language in the U.S., rivaled only by BASIC in high schools and Pascal in university settings. Pascal
Logo’s most iconic learning feature was the turtle, an on-screen shape that showed the result of the language’s movement commands. Some implementations of Logo also featured an animated Turtle Writer robot (see Figure 3.11), which students could program to draw shapes and move around the classroom. (The robots were also equipped with sensors that allowed them to avoid obstacles and learn from their environment.) When programmers typed in Logo commands at a terminal console (or later, on a PC keyboard), the commands produced line drawings and other shapes that the turtle could create—the so-called “turtle graphics.” Turtle graphics
Because Logo is an interpreted language, each command is executed as soon as the programmer enters it, and users are able to see the output of their program statements immediately. Papert and his colleagues used
