IT Trends and Ideas and Impact on Mainframe Operations

I think the idea of structured programming grew out of frustration with spaghetti code that no-one, not even the guy who wrote it thirty minutes ago, could understand. Structured programming imposed rules including neat IF/THEN/ELSE statements, DO loops, no procedures longer than 30 lines and no, I mean absolutely no, GOTO’s. I would claim that structured programming is so deeply embedded in everything we do and the new languages we use that it no longer needs a special name. Mark this one a success.

I could say it is to create languages so simple your end-users could write their own programs. Some 4GL’s went so far as to be non-procedural, meaning that one didn’t write logic so much as “describe the problem.” Unfortunately 4GL’s performed poorly because they were interpreted and had to make too many assumptions. Besides, the end-users had better things to do than write their own programs. The end came with the arrival of spreadsheets and GUI report generators.