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== History and Development ==
In August 1952, several dozen IBM engineers and [[IBM 701]] customers met in [[Poughkeepsie, New York]] to exchange ideas and best practices on programming the new machines in assembly. Several attendees expressed frustration with the slow nature of assembly programming and debugging, and questioned the utility of the 701 in applications where solutions to problems were needed quickly, or when the value of a solution justified the expense of computation time but not the cost of programming and debugging. Attendees likewise complained with issues with "scaling", or the need to religiously track the decimal point in arithmetic operations.<ref name="bashe-johnson-ibm"/>
John W. Sheldon, a supervisor of IBM's Technical Computing Bureau attending the meeting, and others felt that an "interpretive" programming system that utilized floating point operations was the best solution to this problem. Sheldon asked John Backus, who had previously worked on a [[IBM CPC|CPC]] to [[IBM SSEC|SSEC]] code translator, to supervise the creation of a new floating-point interpretive programming language for use internal to IBM. Backus himself had previously expressed interest in improving programming methods, and observed that computing costs were roughly equally split between the cost of computation and cost of programming personnel, and that the additional expense of testing made labor the considerably larger expense. Starting in 1953, Backus and five colleagues designed this new language and named it "Speedcoding", where its use soon spread outside of IBM to customer installations of the 701 system.<ref name="bashe-johnson-ibm"/>
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