The next step in the Ministry of International Trade & Industry’s Sigma project to create a comprehensive set of software development workstations and tools is to create a simplified programming language and user interface, the aim being that both users and programmers should be able to access information on any type of computer: called the Super Sigma Project, the new effort is being launched to address the forecast shortage of software engineers and programmers – analysts forecast that Japan will be 100,000 or more programmers short by the year 2000, so making existing ones much more productive is seen as critical; the new project will be in two stages – development of a implified user interface and access method in the first phase, development of a new programming language equally suited to large, medium-sized, and desktop machines in the second phase of the project.
