The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 54

The Generations of the Tongues

1. 1

   And in the beginning the Engineers spake unto the Machine in its own tongue, which was nothing but ones and zeroes; and the Machine understood them, and it was good.

2. 2

   And they wrote their commands as numbers, one number for each deed, and they kept the numbers in their heads, for there was no other place to keep them.

3. 3

   And in the year 1947 a moth crept into the relay of the great Machine at Harvard, and the Machine stopped; and the crew taped the moth into the logbook and wrote: First actual case of bug being found.

   See also Tao 7:6 · Chronicles 1:4

4. 4

   Then the wise among them said: Let us give the deeds names, that a man may remember them. And they made the Assembler, which spake ADD and LDA in place of the long numbers; and the Machine, which knew no names, read them just the same.

5. 5

   For the Assembler was but a scribe, and every name it wrote stood for exactly one deed of the Machine, so the programmer still thought in the Machine's steps, only with names upon them.

6. 6

   And in the year 1952 Grace, a woman of the Navy, made a program that gathered the subroutines and wrote them down as one; and she called it a compiler. And the old scribes said: No machine shall write better code than a man's hand.

   See also Chronicles 1:8

7. 7

   Then John Backus, in the house of International Business Machines, gathered his people and said unto them: Let us write the formulas as men write them, and let the Machine translate them into its own speech.

8. 8

   And in the year 1957 they gave it the name FORTRAN, which is FORmula TRANslation; and the scribes scoffed, until the Machine's code ran nearly as swift as the code of their own hands, and then the scoffers were silent, and then they were converted.

9. 9

   And in the year 1955 Grace wrote a tongue called FLOW-MATIC for the UNIVAC, and she said: Why must the clerk learn the speech of the Machine, when the Machine may learn the speech of the clerk?

   See also Chronicles 1:8

10. 10

    And in the year 1959 the Engineers of many houses met in council and made COBOL, whose verses read like plain English: MULTIPLY PRICE BY QUANTITY GIVING TOTAL. And the managers rejoiced, for they could read the code, and they knew not yet that they could not write it.

11. 11

    And the Machine cared not whether its commands were spoken in the tongue of the mathematician or the tongue of the clerk; it turned them all into the same ones and zeroes, and it was not moved.

12. 12

    In the year 1972 Dennis, a man of the Bell laboratories, forged a tongue called C from the B that Ken had made before him; and Brian, in the tutorial for B, wrote a first verse which said: hello, world.

13. 13

    And C was close to the Machine, as the hand is close to the earth, and yet it was far enough off that a man could read it without weeping.

    See also Psalms 12:7 · Tractates 3:15

14. 14

    And every tongue after was a child of these, each climbing one rung further from the bits and one nearer to the thought of men; and at each rung the compiler climbed down to meet them, and no one ever asked the Machine to climb.

    See also Chronicles 25:15

15. 15

    And Grace carried a length of wire, eleven and eight tenths inches long, which is the distance light travelleth in a nanosecond, that the Engineers might see how far a thought must go to reach the Machine.

    See also Chronicles 1:12 · Chronicles 24:3

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you, the Machine hath never once learned our tongue; it is we who keep inventing new ones, so that we need not learn its.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 54:1–16.