Programming in this context does not refer to computer programming, but comes from the use of program by the United States military to refer to proposed training and logistics schedules, which were the problems Dantzig studied at that time
If you don’t know, you are in for a treat. Here is Bellman’s own description of how he came up with the term “dynamic programming “ —
I spent the Fall quarter (of 1950) at RAND. My first task was to find a name for multistage decision processes. An interesting question is, ‘Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from?’
The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word, research. I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term, research, in his presence.
You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term, mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose?
In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word, ‘programming.’ I wanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying—I thought, let’s kill two birds with one stone. Let’s take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense.
It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it’s impossible to use the word, dynamic, in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It’s impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities (Autobiography, p. 159).
People up-thread have been getting cranky about the use of “programming “ in this sense.
Now of course, “programming“ for optimization has been well-entrenched since the 1970s at least. But perhaps Bellman’s story does give some cover to those who feel the word “programming“ has been wrongly appropriated?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_optimization#Hist...