ABSTRACT
Despite the obvious shift in demand, reflected by this evolutionary change, and notwithstanding current rhetoric about new software environments, little has changed in the fundamental structure of programming languages since Fortran. The step from machine language to Fortran has yet to be dwarfed by a step from Fortran to anything else! Contemporary languages still carry the same basic classes of commands for decision, repetition, binding and unbinding, arithmetic and math, procedure definition and use, as well as the separable and increasingly bulkier input output (110) or user interface commands. It should not be too surprising that this structural inertia is accompanied by a corresponding functional feebleness-programming productivity has barely budged beyond about 1% per year, by even the most optimistic of counts, and programming continues to be out of the reach of most people.
