ACM and the Professional Programmer

Abstract

In the very early days of computing, professional programming was nearly synonymous with academic research because computers tended to be devices that existed only or largely in academic settings. As computers became commercially available, they began to be found in private-sector, business environments. The 1950s and 1960s brought computing in the form of automation and data processing to the private sector and, along with this came a growing community of professionals whose focus on computing was pragmatic and production oriented. Computing was (and still is) evolving, and the academic community continued to explore new software and hardware concepts and constructs. New languages were invented (and are still being invented) to try new ideas in the formulation of programs. The introduction of time sharing created new territory to explore. In today’s world cloud computing is the new time sharing, more or less.