Programming languages

Posted on by wanderer

One sector that has reached most of the world’s people, and that also has a highly technical sector supporting it and fluent in one natural language, is informatics or Information technology (IT for short). If you are reading this text it is because of IT. It has been written down in a computer, sent to a publisher through the Internet where it has navigated different servers. Then again processed in another set of computers, and sent to your screen. This is still text, and it could have been done all like in pre-electronics time, but the difficulty of that would have been much bigger, as society is not familiar with the old ways, and the infrastructure is no longer in place to produce this kind of work in an accessible way.

Informatics is ubiquitous all around us, probably even your washing machine might have some pieces of code into it. Internally many electronic devices run using a specific language which is called “software”, a set of instructions written in a programming language which translates instructions that can be understood by humans to instructions that can be understood by the machine. That “language” is a set of instructions based on another natural language, English, the same one as aviation.

You can check this out quite easily, if you go to an internet browser based on open-sourced technology, such as Opera and Firefox, right-click on any web page and select the option “source code of the page”, or “origin of the page” or something along these lines. If you select that option you will see a long list of strange text. These are the instructions, the “programming language” will be a mixture of HTML and Java Script, and no matter where you are, virtually all of the keywords that you would see in that text will be “if”, “for”, “script”, “function”, “window”, “style”… All of them English vocabulary. Any computer in the world would use them and virtually all widely used programming languages are equally based on instructions that make use of English words such as “do”, “while” “end”… If one wants to program one would need at least a basic understanding of the natural language that is English.

This process of English coding itself into the infrastructure of IT happened for similar reasons to those of aviation. After World War II, a German scientist had already developed the first programming language, Plankalkül. But with the development of electronics moving to the US, and the Soviets not picking it up from this lonely German, the Plankalkül did not have much influence in the languages to come.

In the US in particular there was a heavy investment in all the IT sector by the US industrial might and wider university sector in UK and US. That effort set the backbone of all the programming languages to come. All of them were trying to make it easy for programmers to translate the instructions to the machine, and of course, for them English was the easiest language to use. Therefore, the syntax of the languages, by default, was in English. As with aviation, this was the first time that a prevailing technology was developed by only one linguistic group. The technology took global scale thanks to the level of connectivity developed since the years of the navigation breakthroughs. The English-speaking world piggybacked on the networks already established. With the redefining of world equilibria after WWII, English achieved almost total dominance in two key aspects of our current world, Aviation and IT.

To put this in context, there exist now about 8,500 different programming languages, all of them developed in the last 70 years, and virtually all of them with some amount of English in its structure. For comparison, that is more than the total of natural languages surviving on the planet today, about 7,000. These spoken languages took thousands of years to develop, and most of their diversity remains in only one island, Papua, where about 1,500 exist.

What is more interesting from this is why the Soviets, or the rest of the powers for that matter, were not able to muscle out alternative systems. As we have seen previously, the Europeans took over almost the complete surface of the planet. By the end of WWII the only territories that had some influence over the rest of the world were the US, the UK and the USSR. UK and US had English as their language, which translated to their technology. The USSR had Russian as its main language, so did they develop a programming language based in Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet?

The answer is that they did, but with few exceptions, did not continue the effort. By 1959, in Minsk, they developed a computer that used assembly language (strong correspondence between the instructions and the specific architecture of the computer), and later auto-programming systems translators — “Autocode Inzhener” and “Autocode Economist. It also incorporated translated languages such as ALGOL, ALGAMS and FORTRAN, which were developed in English logic. Meanwhile, in 1965 they developed a computer called MIR, not to be confused with the MIR space station. МИР (MIR) means both “world” and “peace” in Russian. The computer used AлМИР-65 (Almir-65) as coding language.

However, that incipient development did not come to foster further independent development. By 1966, when the Soviet Union could have had some influence in the wider world, the US and themselves stopped it. For example, when the Soviets signed a cooperation agreement with France to share IT research, the US punished France by blocking the purchasing of US mainframes, the supercomputers of the time. That might have been the pivotal moment for two independent computing systems. By 1968, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, an umbrella for Soviet-aligned communist and socialist countries –China already broke relations with the CCCP by that time– it was decided to abandon the Minsk line of computers, despite being on a par with its western counterparts, because it was decided that the software development was much more advanced on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Thus, the strategy shifted to develop a series of mainframe computers compatible with IBM’s System/360-370, as all the code could be more easily imported. The hardware was created by reverse engineering, but the software, the code, was based on IBM’s. From then on, the scientists and engineers were ordered more and more to copy semiconductor designs, playing always a catch-up dynamic which did not provide much room for fostering, and keeping, independent systems. By the 70s, the Soviet government ended most of the independent development, encouraging the pirating of US systems, and then by the mid-70s the US started exporting directly the computer hardware to the Soviet sphere.

And we all know what happened by the 80s… Through computing one can easily see the slow, and then fast, train of Soviet crash. With Perestroika, the Soviet bloc increasingly adopted foreign computers, but they were relatively more expensive. As the system was collapsing, the West pressured the Soviet government to grant exit visas to computer experts. By the fall of the CCCP at the end of 1991 the large state companies that manufactured computers for the Soviet military virtually ceased to exist.

With that rapid collapse, any real hopes for an alternative, non-English syntax system, mostly banished, with only a few strongholds. One is РЕФАЛ language that originated from the time that alternative system might have seemed possible (1966-68), and still is in use today, albeit also with English syntax. РЕФАЛ (Refal) is oriented toward symbolic computations, meaning that is good for mathematical and theoretical development, but also for writing sophisticated computer programs. These characteristics make it useful for some niche applications like text processing, language translation, artificial intelligence, but is not widely used and was not widely adapted for the Soviet mainframes. Another stronghold was Elbrus, a family of computers starting in 1972 and used in the space programme, nuclear weapons research, and defence. They initially used the Эль-76 (Elb-76) programming language, based on Russian syntax, but also used ALGOL, which is English-derived. Moreover, by 1978, Elbrus implemented a processor that executes instructions in an order depending on the availability of input data and execution units, independently of the actual order in the program, with register renaming and speculative execution that was years ahead of Western counterparts. Since Elbrus was linked to the military and space sectors, which were partially kept afloat in Russia by the West to keep a bit of the military and space capacity in place, that niche system had some options to persist.

For the rest, the Soviet system did not provide an alternative architecture to the Anglo one, not even in revolutionary terms, like the French with their Metric system, which persisted despite the first French Republic, and first French Empire burned to ashes in the Napoleonic flames. That universal role, in coding, has been left uncontested, so far, to English.

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Aviation, One language to rule them all

Aviation, One language to rule them all

Posted on by wanderer

From roads let us go to the next technology in transport, the sky!

But first let us briefly return to our beloved Metric as an example of how the institutionalisation of technical terms has changed how most of the people on the planet see themselves. For example, the metric is even applied to such delicate aspects of our life as how much our newborn baby weighs.

So if the Metric is so intertwined in our everyday lives, it is interesting to look at one of the first and most powerful real universalisations that actually does not use the metric: aviation. For anybody familiar with planes, they will notice that many of the indications of flight control, altitude, distances, meteorological information and other measures are in what is called the Imperial system. I.e. in feet, knots, miles etc.

Aviation, like road traffic, greatly benefits from a common universal language, and in this case it has achieved it. As with the other nascent scientifico-technical internationalisations, aviation’s global language arises hand in hand with the rapid growth and usage of the new technology, and now the neighbours are not just overland but also over air. Therefore, as with the telegraph, the previously semi-disconnected UK and US administrations are much more susceptible to fold into common standards with the rest of the western world, or in this case, to impose them.

Little more than 100 years ago, almost nobody had ever flown. Thirty years later planes were used to bomb and burn entire cities, like in the case of Guernica, sadly the most noticeable example of the use of the new aerial technology aimed at the destruction of civilian life. A decade later, after WWII, planes were routinely crossing the Atlantic. That rapid expansion needed close collaboration to manage these vehicles across multiple lands and cultural codes. No one would want to have signalling that would confound the pilots or the machine maintenance because different protocols were used in each of the landing areas, nasty results ahead otherwise.

In the early beginnings of cross-Atlantic flight, six nations grouped to divide the Atlantic into ten zones. Each zone had a letter representing that zone, and a station providing radio relay, radio navigation beacons, weather reports and rescue alerts if an aircraft went down.

To coordinate the radio signals, administrations had to agree to common protocols, technologies, radio frequencies, languages, measures and so on and so forth. That was the beginning of international flight.

Since we jumped to after WWII, the United Nations is already up and running (we will deal in detail with the UN in later sections). Therefore, it fell into the hands of the UN to set up an agency organising all the protocols and regulations of air flight: the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The ICAO has virtually universal participation (192 out of 193 nations in the UN — only Liechtenstein is out, as it lacks an international airport, but so does the puny Monaco and that does not stop it from being an ICAO member). Then, because, well, virtually everything else in the world was in Metric at the time, the ICAO’s guidelines recommended that the needed units to coordinate flight be based on the metric system.

They failed.

The fact that aviation is in Imperial lies down to the usual suspects, the US and the UK. In the basic framework that we set, technology, independent administrations and colonialism, aviation is a good example of the first-mover advantage of a big administration. A big part of the aviation sector was established in the US, especially at the moment that aviation became really international, just with the onset of WWII. From that moment, inertia took over, and whatever units the dominant player was using, these became the ones to be kept, until now. The US and UK never forced their hands. In this case, the standard just became and now in planes you find this:

  • Feet for height
  • Knots for airspeed (Nautical Miles/Hour)
  • Nautical Miles or feet for distance
  • Statute Miles or feet for weather (visibility and Runway Visual Range)
  • Inches of Mercury for altimeter settings
  • Pounds/square inch for pressure
  • Pounds for the fuel quantity on the aircraft
  • Pounds/hour for fuel flow
  • Gallons to order/purchase fuel

But, wait, what about the Cold War, how did the Soviet bloc adopt an “imperial” system? you might ask. You did well to ask, the aviation sector of the former USSR republics, North Korea and China. However, Russia changed their system to imperial in 2017 for practical purposes of internationalisation, showing how inertia can hamper or shift standardisation – we will talk about inertia and its relevance in the human world later on.

The aviation system is a good example of how things work on the drive to universalisation. Again, it is a technology linked with a global connectivity which forces the policymaking institutions and a highly technical sector to agree to a common understanding. Here geographical extension, technique, technology, communication, policies and standards go hand in hand to establish a more or less established global agreement, with the limits of inertia and the fight between two standards, the traditional one (Imperial) and the scientifico-technical one (Metric).

Nevertheless, the universal I want to focus on for aviation is another, its language for communication, where a natural language (although highly technified) took over. Only one spoken and written language is used in the sector, that language is known by everybody in aviation. That is a global spoken language.

My father once told me that English was in the past a planetary language because all in aviation used English. The moment that English was adopted in aviation might be the first time that a language is truly universal among one specific sector: traffic controllers and all pilots who fly internationally. In the aviation case we have the bases of a natural language becoming a global phenomenon, although circumscribed to a really technical sector. In this case, though, for the first time there were no local variations or the connivance of two or more standards. One language to rule them all.

In the same way that the Imperial system is the dominant (but not exclusive) measurement system in aviation, English became the dominant and exclusive language in aviation, despite what the ICAO logo at the beginning of this entry shows.

Nevertheless, the language, despite being a natural language, was limited to professional usage. I do not see the air traffic controllers writing poetry based on the level of English that they need for their work. In fact it is a kind of technical language: adverse yaw, downwash, squawk… are mostly obscure for anybody using English but not working in the aeronautic sector.

In the case of aviation, like the signage for cars, the need for a common universal language arises from the rapid growth and usage of a new technology, and administrations doing what administrations do best: administer.

The process of embracing a unified rule code has had slightly more success than the Vienna Convention for road signs. Aviation has achieved not only the existence of ICAO with virtually universal participation, but also the language of communication in the aeronautic sector, that is, the spoken and written language is only one and has to be known by anybody working in the sector. Now, at a planetary scale a single language is uniquely present in the sector.

Like we have seen before, the aviation system presents the process of universalisation through technical development, administrative interaction and imperialism. Again, aviation is a technology linked with a global connectivity which forces the policymaking institutions and a highly technical sector to agree to a common understanding. Here geographical extension, technique, technology, communication, policies and standards go hand in hand to establish a global agreement. Impressively though, in the aviation case tradition is the one that has kept the two technical standards (Imperial and Metric), but has, for the first time, erased natural language diversity. Aviation = English globally.

We have the emergence of a natural language becoming a global phenomenon. We will see the limits of natural languages becoming the vehicular communication of technical or niche sectors, but for now we have seen that aviation was the first, or one of the first, sectors to break the crystal ceiling of a unique global language taking over one piece of the world. Aviation has increased the connectivity of the planet and has made accessible and affordable rapid travelling times for a huge chunk of the world’s population. However, it has not yet reached the vast majority of the population.

For now, I leave you with the fact that, for as long as humanity has existed, English now constitutes the first truly, and unique, global language that has relatively easy access for learning and use, from technical to everything else. If the metric is used for something so tender as the weight of a newborn baby, imagine what a whole language is doing, and will do, to us.

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Roads: rules and signs

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Programming languages