For the last five years, programming costs have been considered to be roughly equal to all other costs of operating data processing equipment, such as price or rental, installation, power, etc. Extrapolation of programming and engineering advances indicate that this percentage may well climb from 50 to 90 within the next five years. Machine speeds are now 100 times what they were five years ago. Programming cannot maintain this pace, nor will pouring armies of programmers into the gap help appreciably. The answer must lie in advanced programming systems which do a much larger proportion of the reasoning that humans now do. The evolution of new and improved hardware faces the user with additional problems. He finds himself with the opportunity to obtain a computer which will do the same job faster and cheaper than his present machine, yet his programming investment for the old machine must usually be considered a total loss. As the use of computers settled down to a predictable production pace, the costs of reprogramming a large volume of applications became staggering. Without the prospect of being able to program in a language independent of computer characteristics, the user must face an endless series of interruptions with changing machines.