History of programming languages
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The history of programming languages spans from documentation of early mechanical computers to modern tools for software development. Early programming languages were highly specialized, relying on mathematical notation and similarly obscure syntax.[1] Throughout the 20th century, research in compiler theory led to the creation of high-level programming languages, which use a more accessible syntax to communicate instructions.
The first high-level programming language was
Early history
During 1842–1849,
The first computer codes were specialized for their applications: e.g., Alonzo Church was able to express the lambda calculus in a formulaic way and the Turing machine was an abstraction of the operation of a tape-marking machine.
First programming languages
In the 1940s, the first recognizably modern electrically powered computers were created. The limited speed and memory capacity forced programmers to write hand-tuned assembly language programs. It was eventually realized that programming in assembly language required a great deal of intellectual effort.[citation needed]
An early proposal for a high-level programming language was Plankalkül, developed by Konrad Zuse for his Z1 computer between 1942 and 1945 but not implemented at the time.[7]
The first functioning programming languages designed to communicate instructions to a computer were written in the early 1950s.
In the early 1950s,
In 1954,
Another early programming language was devised by Grace Hopper in the US, named FLOW-MATIC. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand during the period from 1955 until 1959. Hopper found that business data processing customers were uncomfortable with mathematical notation, and in early 1955, she and her team wrote a specification for an English language programming language and implemented a prototype.[14] The FLOW-MATIC compiler became publicly available in early 1958 and was substantially complete in 1959.[15] Flow-Matic was a major influence in the design of COBOL, since only it and its direct descendant AIMACO were in use at the time.[16]
Other languages still in use today include LISP (1958), invented by John McCarthy and COBOL (1959), created by the Short Range Committee. Another milestone in the late 1950s was the publication, by a committee of American and European computer scientists, of "a new language for algorithms"; the ALGOL 60 Report (the "ALGOrithmic Language"). This report consolidated many ideas circulating at the time and featured three key language innovations:
- nested block structure: code sequences and associated declarations could be grouped into blocks without having to be turned into separate, explicitly named procedures;
- lexical scoping: a block could have its own private variables, procedures and functions, invisible to code outside that block, that is, information hiding.
Another innovation, related to this, was in how the language was described:
- a mathematically exact notation, Backus–Naur form (BNF), was used to describe the language's syntax. Nearly all subsequent programming languages have used a variant of BNF to describe the context-free portion of their syntax.
ALGOL's key ideas were continued, producing ALGOL 68:
- syntax and semantics became even more orthogonal, with anonymous routines, a recursive typing system with higher-order functions, etc.;
- not only the context-free part, but the full language syntax and semantics were defined formally, in terms of Van Wijngaarden grammar, a formalism designed specifically for this purpose.
ALGOL 68's many little-used language features (for example, concurrent and parallel blocks) and its complex system of syntactic shortcuts and automatic type coercions made it unpopular with implementers and gained it a reputation of being difficult. Niklaus Wirth actually walked out of the design committee to create the simpler Pascal language.
Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:
- 1951 – Regional Assembly Language
- 1952 – Autocode
- 1954 – IPL (forerunner to LISP)
- 1955 – FLOW-MATIC (led to COBOL)
- 1957 – FORTRAN (first compiler)
- 1957 – COMTRAN (precursor to COBOL)
- 1958 – LISP
- 1958 – ALGOL 58
- 1959 – FACT(forerunner to COBOL)
- 1959 – COBOL
- 1959 – RPG
- 1960 – ALGOL 60
- 1962 – APL
- 1962 – Simula
- 1962 – SNOBOL
- 1963 – CPL(forerunner to C)
- 1964 – Speakeasy
- 1964 – BASIC
- 1964 – PL/I
- 1966 – JOSS
- 1966 – MUMPS
- 1967 – BCPL (forerunner to C)
- 1967 – Logo (an educational language that later influenced Smalltalk and Scratch).
Establishing fundamental paradigms
The period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s brought a major flowering of programming languages. Most of the major language paradigms now in use were invented in this period:[original research?]
- Federal Reserve Boardin the early 1970s and then was made available commercially; Speakeasy and Modeleasy are still in use.
- Simula, invented in the late 1960s by Nygaard and Dahl as a superset of ALGOL 60, was the first language designed to support object-oriented programming.
- FORTH, the earliest concatenative programming language was designed by Charles Moore in 1969 as a personal development system while at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).
- between 1969 and 1973.
- Smalltalk (mid-1970s) provided a complete ground-up design of an object-oriented language.
- Prolog, designed in 1972 by Alain Colmerauer, Phillipe Roussel, and Robert Kowalski, was the first logic programming language.
- ML built a polymorphic type system (invented by Robin Milner in 1973) on Lisp,[17] pioneering statically typed functional programming languages. Each of these languages spawned an entire family of descendants, and most modern languages count at least one of them in their ancestry.
The 1960s and 1970s also saw considerable debate over the merits of "structured programming", which essentially meant programming without the use of goto
. A significant fraction of programmers believed that, even in languages that provide goto
, it is bad programming style to use it except in rare circumstances. This debate was closely related to language design: some languages had no goto
, which forced the use of structured programming.
To provide even faster compile times, some languages were structured for "one-pass compilers" which expect subordinate routines to be defined first, as with Pascal, where the main routine, or driver function, is the final section of the program listing.
Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:
1980s: consolidation, modules, performance
The 1980s were years of relative consolidation in
One important new trend in language design was an increased focus on programming for large-scale systems through the use of modules, or large-scale organizational units of code.
Although major new paradigms for imperative programming languages did not appear, many researchers expanded on the ideas of prior languages and adapted them to new contexts. For example, the languages of the
The 1980s also brought advances in programming language implementation. The reduced instruction set computer (RISC) movement in computer architecture postulated that hardware should be designed for compilers rather than for human assembly programmers. Aided by central processing unit (CPU) speed improvements that enabled increasingly aggressive compiling methods, the RISC movement sparked greater interest in compiler technology for high-level languages.
Language technology continued along these lines well into the 1990s.
Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:
- 1980 – C with classes, renamed in 1983)
- 1983 – Ada
- 1984 – Common Lisp
- 1984 – MATLAB
- 1984 – dBase III, dBase III Plus (FoxBASE)
- 1985 – Eiffel
- 1986 – Objective-C
- 1986 – LabVIEW (visual programming language)
- 1986 – Erlang
- 1987 – Perl
- 1988 – PIC (markup language)
- 1988 – Tcl
- 1988 – Mathematica, only got a separate name in June 2013)
- 1989 – FL (Backus)
1990s: the Internet age
The rapid growth of the Internet in the mid-1990s was the next major historic event in programming languages. By opening up a radically new platform for computer systems, the Internet created an opportunity for new languages to be adopted. In particular, the
More radical and innovative than the RAD languages were the new scripting languages. These did not directly descend from other languages and featured new syntaxes and more liberal incorporation of features. Many consider these scripting languages to be more productive than even the RAD languages, but often because of choices that make small programs simpler but large programs more difficult to write and maintain.[citation needed] Nevertheless, scripting languages came to be the most prominent ones used in connection with the Web.
Some programming languages included other languages in their distribution to save the development time. for example both of Python and Ruby included Tcl to support GUI programming through libraries like Tkinter.
Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:
- 1990 – Haskell
- 1990 – Python
- 1991 – Visual Basic
- 1993 – Lua
- 1993 – R
- 1994 – CLOS (part of ANSI Common Lisp)
- 1995 – Ruby
- 1995 – Ada 95
- 1995 – Java
- 1995 – Delphi (Object Pascal)
- 1995 – Visual FoxPro
- 1995 – JavaScript
- 1995 – PHP
- 1996 – OCaml
- 1997 – Rebol
Current trends
Programming language evolution continues, in both industry and research. Some of the recent trends have included:
- Increasing support for functional programming in mainstream languages used commercially, including purely functional programming for making code easier to reason about and to parallelize (at both micro- and macro- levels)
- Constructs to support concurrent and distributed programming.
- Mechanisms for adding security and dependent typing, information flow control, static thread safety.
- Alternative mechanisms for composability and modularity: delegates, aspects.
- Component-oriented software development.
- reflection or access to the abstract syntax tree
- AOP or Aspect Oriented Programmingallowing developers to insert code in another module or class at "join points"
- Domain-specific languages and code generation
- XML for graphical interface (XUL, Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML))
- AOP or
- Increased interest in distribution and mobility.
- Integration with databases, including XML and relational databases.
- Open source as a developmental philosophy for languages, including the GNU Compiler Collection and languages such as PHP, Python, Ruby, and Scala.
- More interest in visual programming languages like Scratch, LabVIEW, and PWCT
- Massively parallel languages for GPU graphics processing units and supercomputer arrays, including OpenCL
- Early research into quantum computing programming languages (see list)
- Early research in applying artificial intelligence (AI) methods to generate code using AI like using GPT-3 and Gemini.[18][19]
Many Big Tech companies introduced multiple new programming languages that are designed to serve their needs and provides first-class support for their platforms. for example:
- Microsoft introduced C#, F#, TypeScript, Q#, Bosque and Power Fx.
- Google introduced Go, Dart and Carbon.
- Apple introduced Swift.
- Meta introduced Hack.
Some notable languages developed during this period and are listed in TIOBE index (Top 100 programming languages) as of February 2024 include:[20][21]
- 2000 – ActionScript
- 2001 – C#
- 2001 – D
- 2002 – Scratch
- 2003 – Groovy
- 2003 – Scala
- 2005 – F#
- 2006 – PowerShell
- 2007 – Clojure
- 2008 – Nim
- 2009 – Go
- 2011 – Dart
- 2011 – Kotlin
- 2012 – Julia
- 2012 – TypeScript
- 2012 – Elixir
- 2014 – Swift
- 2014 – Hack
- 2015 – Rust
- 2015 – Raku
- 2016 – Ring
- 2016 – Zig
- 2022 – Carbon
Other new programming languages include Elm, Ballerina, Red, Crystal, Haxe, V (Vlang), Reason, and Mojo.
Key figures
Some key people who helped develop programming languages:
- Ada Lovelace, published first computer program
- Alan Cooper, developer of Visual Basic.
- Alan Kay, pioneering work on object-oriented programming, and originator of Smalltalk.
- Anders Hejlsberg, developer of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript.
- Arthur Whitney, developer of A+, k, and q.
- Bertrand Meyer, inventor of Eiffel.
- Bjarne Stroustrup, developer of C++.
- Brad Cox, co-creator of Objective-C.
- Brendan Eich, developer of JavaScript.
- AMPLprogramming languages.
- Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, the first concatenative programming language, and a prominent name in stack machine microprocessor design.
- Chris Lattner, creator of Swift, Mojo and LLVM.
- Cleve Moler, creator of MATLAB.
- Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C. Unix Operating System, Plan 9 Operating System.
- Douglas McIlroy, influenced and designed such languages as SNOBOL, TRAC, PL/I, ALTRAN, TMG and C++.
- Grace Hopper, first to use the term compiler and developer of FLOW-MATIC, influenced development of COBOL. Popularized machine-independent programming languages and the term "debugging".
- Guido van Rossum, creator of Python.
- James Gosling, lead developer of Java and its precursor, Oak.
- Ada 83.
- polymorphic lambda calculus(System F).
- Jeff Bezanson, main designer, and one of the core developers of Julia.
- Jeffrey Snover, inventor of PowerShell.
- Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang.
- John Backus, inventor of Fortran, cooperated in designing ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60.
- John C. Reynolds, co-inventor of the polymorphic lambda calculus (System F).
- John McCarthy, inventor of LISP, design committee of ALGOL 60.
- John von Neumann, originator of the operating system concept.
- Graydon Hoare, inventor of Rust.
- Ken Thompson, inventor of B and Go.
- Kenneth E. Iverson, developer of APL, co-developer of J with Roger Hui.
- Konrad Zuse, designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül (which influenced ALGOL 58[22]).
- Kristen Nygaard, pioneered object-oriented programming, co-invented Simula.
- Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language (see Perl and Raku).
- Martin Odersky, creator of Scala, and previously a contributor to the design of Java.
- Martin Richards developed the BCPL programming language, forerunner of the B and C languages.
- assembler(IBM 701).
- Niklaus Wirth, inventor of Pascal, Modula and Oberon.
- Ole-Johan Dahl, pioneered object-oriented programming, co-invented Simula.
- Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP.
- Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure.
- Robert Gentleman, co-creator of R.
- Robert Griesemer, co-creator of Go.
- Hindley–Milner polymorphic type inference.
- Plan 9 (operating system)Operating System co-author.
- Ross Ihaka, co-creator of R.
- Stanley Cohen, inventor of Speakeasy, which was created with an OOPS, object-oriented programming system, the first instance, in 1964.
- Mathematica.
- Walter Bright, creator of D.
- Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby.
See also
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- SIGPLAN
- History of Programming Languages Conference
- History of compiler construction
- History of computing hardware
- Programming language
- Timeline of computing
- Timeline of programming languages
- List of programming languages
- List of programmers
References
- ^ Hopper (1978) p. 16.
- ^ Knuth, Donald E.; Pardo, Luis Trabb. "Early development of programming languages". Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology. 7. Marcel Dekker: 419–493.
- ^ Corrado Böhm's PhD thesis
- ^ Bales, Rebecca (24 July 2023). "Charles Babbage Analytical Engine Explained". history-computer.com.
- ^ Swade, Doron. "The Engines". computerhistory.org. Retrieved 23 February 2024.
- ^ In 1998 and 2000 compilers were created for the language as a historical exercise. Rojas, Raúl, et al. (2000). "Plankalkül: The First High-Level Programming Language and its Implementation". Institut frame Informatik, Freie Universität Berlin, Technical Report B-3/2000. (full text)
- ISBN 978-0-321-33025-3.
- ^ "Fortran creator John Backus dies – Tech and gadgets". NBC News. 2007-03-20. Retrieved 2010-04-25.
- ^ "CSC-302 99S : Class 02: A Brief History of Programming Languages". Math.grin.edu. Archived from the original on 2010-07-15. Retrieved 2010-04-25.
- . Retrieved 7 November 2019.
- ^ Eugene Loh (18 June 2010). "The Ideal HPC Programming Language". Queue. 8 (6). Association of Computing Machines.
- ^ "HPL – A Portable Implementation of the High-Performance Linpack Benchmark for Distributed-Memory Computers". Retrieved 2015-02-21.
- ^ Hopper (1978) p. 16.
- ^ Sammet (1969) p. 316
- ^ Sammet (1978) p. 204.
- ^ Gordon, Michael J. C. (1996). "From LCF to HOL: a short history" (PDF). p. 3. Retrieved 2015-05-04.
Edinburgh LCF, including the ML interpreter, was implemented in Lisp.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved August 4, 2020.
- ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
- ^ "TIOBE Index, Top 100 programming languages according to TIOBE Index". www.tiobe.com. TIOBE index. 22 February 2024.
- ^ "GitHub's Octoverse 2018". Archived from the original on 2019-03-22.
- ISBN 978-0262681377. Retrieved October 25, 2013.
Further reading
- Rosen, Saul, (editor), Programming Systems and Languages, McGraw-Hill, 1967.
- Sammet, Jean E., Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals, Prentice-Hall, 1969.
- Sammet, Jean E. (July 1972). "Programming Languages: History and Future". Communications of the ACM. 15 (7): 601–610. S2CID 2003242.
- Richard L. Wexelblat (ed.): History of Programming Languages, Academic Press1981.
- Thomas J. Bergin and Richard G. Gibson (eds.): History of Programming Languages, Addison Wesley, 1996.
- Sebesta, Robert W. Concepts of programming languages. Pearson Education India, 2004.