A Brief Overview of the History of Programming Languages

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Process of taking an algorithm and encoding it by using a programming language so that it is able to be executed by a computer is called ‘programming’. A computer program is written as a series of human understandable computer instructions that can be read by a compiler and a linker.

Augusta Ada Lovelace, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron is recognized as the world's first programmer because of the work of complete detailed method for calculating ‘Bernoulli Numbers’ by her for the Analytical Engine designed by Charles Babbage during 1842-1843.World's first modern electrically powered computers were designed in 1940. punch card census data was coded by Herman Hollerith

About in 1950 programming languages which can communicate instructions to computers were written. Plankalkul was an early high level programming language which was designed for computers by a German engineer named Konrad Zuse in between 1943-1945. Though it was an early high-level programming language to be designed for a computer it was not implemented till 2000. Short code which was proposed by John Mauchly in 1949 was one of the initial high level programming languages that was ever developed for electronic computers. Short code statements are represented by mathematical expressions.

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In early 1950s Alick Glennie developed Autocode. Later it was used to develop Mark 1 Autocode by R.A.Brooker in 1954 and to develop EDSAC 2 Autocode by F.Hartley in 1961. In 1954 FORTRAN which stands for Formula Translation was invented at IBM by a team led by John Backus and this was the first widely used high-level general purpose programming language to have functional implementations. Here automatically converts a language into a machine code. Till today this language is used for the programs in supercomputers. As an example, NASA still uses Fortran. FLOW-MATIC was another early language of programming developed by Grace hopper and it was developed for UNIVAC 1 from 1955 to 1959. Later COBOL or the Common Business Oriented Language was developed by the influence of FLOW-MATIC in 1959. In 1958 ALGOL was created for the scientific use by a committee and the ALGOL stands for Algorithmic Language. This language served as the starting point to the development of many programming languages such as Pascal, C, C++ and Java. In 1959 John McCarthy created the programming language named LISP which stands for List Processing language. This language was originally created for the researches in Artificial Intelligence but nowadays it is used in situations where the languages like Python or Ruby has been used. The programming language called BASIC which stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code was developed by John George Kennny and Thomas Eugine Kurtz in 1964. Computer games were often written in Basic such as Microsoft’s Altair, Apple II. Later Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a modified version of BASIC which became the first ever Microsoft product.

In 1970 Niklaus Wirth developed the programming language named Pascal in honor of French mathematician Blaise Pascal. It was one of the easiest languages to learn and so it was used a tool for teaching computer programming and data structuring. It was commonly used for Windows Application development. (SKYPE) In Apple company which was found by Steve Jobbs, Pascal was their main language in software production in their early days. Later in 1972 at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Sammltalk was developed by Alan Kay and his colleagues. This language allowed the programmers to modify the code on the fly and also introduced so many other aspects which found in modern computer programming languages such as Python, Java and Ruby. In the same year Dennis Ritchie at Bell labs developed a computer programming language which is considered by many as the first high level language and it was named as C. Later it influenced in so many languages such as Ruby, Java, Perl, JavaScript, PHP, Python and etc. It is mainly using in system programming and computer game development (UNIX). Similarly in the same year again Structured Query Language or SQL was developed by Donald D. Chamberlain and this is still used for database editing and making. Later MATLAB was developed by Cleve Moler in 1978 and it stands for Matrix Laboratory and it is one of the best languages that is been used in writing mathematical programs and drawing dimensional graphics.

In 1980s period several others programming languages came into play. In 1980 ADA which is also known as After ADA Lobelace was created by Jean Ichbian. It was derived by Pascal in order to developing large software systems such as NASA, NSTAR. On the other hand, it is used for primary uses like banking transportation, commercial aviation and etc. Then, C++ was developed in 1983 by Bjarne Stroustrup. This is one of the most used languages in modern world and it is used for writing game engines and most of the packaged software. As an extension of C, C++ contains the enhancements such as classes, virtual functions and templates. C++ is mainly used in Adobe, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Objective C which is expanded on C by adding message-passing functionality based on Smalltalk language was created by Brad Cox and Tom Love of Stepstone in 1983. It is used by Apple’s OS X and iOS operating systems. In 1987 Larry wall developed Perl as a scripting language which is designed for text editing. But now this language is being widely used in administration of Linux systems, web development and programming of networks. In 1991 Guido Van Rossum developed a programming language named Python and in the same year Microsoft developed Visual Basic. Yukihiro Matsumoto created a new programming language called Ruby in 1993 which is specially using in productive and enjoyable programming such as Twitter and Hulu. In 1995 James Gosling developed Java which was originally named as Oak and in the same year Ramsu Lerdorf created PHP. In 2000 C# was developed and similarly so many other languages were developed at the same time, and it will continue on.

As we know, most of these languages were developed under the influence of previous languages, and they are still used today, and this will continue into the future.

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A Brief Overview of the History of Programming Languages. (2022, September 01). Edubirdie. Retrieved April 25, 2024, from https://edubirdie.com/examples/a-brief-overview-of-the-history-of-programming-languages/
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A Brief Overview of the History of Programming Languages. [online]. Available at: <https://edubirdie.com/examples/a-brief-overview-of-the-history-of-programming-languages/> [Accessed 25 Apr. 2024].
A Brief Overview of the History of Programming Languages [Internet]. Edubirdie. 2022 Sept 01 [cited 2024 Apr 25]. Available from: https://edubirdie.com/examples/a-brief-overview-of-the-history-of-programming-languages/
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