TOPIC 2.2.1
History of
Programming Languages
When the first computers were developed, programming meant working with ones and zeros or even panels of switches. Programming languages like C++ did not develop overnight. A series of developments lead to the types of advanced programming languages we use today.
In the late forties, Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, sought a better way to program computers. He developed a system of symbols that could be used to solve problems in a step-by-step way. The system was called Plankalkul.
Alan Turing was among the first to recognize that programming in machine language would limit the speed and easy of programming computers. Turing wrote a set of shorthand code for writing programs for the Mark I. Turing’s code was better than ones and zeros, but was still not recognizable to the untrained.
John Mauchly created a code called Short Code. It was still fairly cryptic, but it allowed equations to be entered using a special code. This new code inspired a woman named Grace Murray Hopper.
Grace Hopper was the first real advocate of creating higher-level languages.
http://www.uta.fi/~majyho/guru/Hopper.html
One of the first widely-used programming languages was FORTRAN, developed in the 1950s by IBM. FORTRAN (short for Formula Translator) was designed to work with mathematical data.
http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~limt/fortran.html
In 1958, a language called ALGOL (Algorithm Language) was developed. It was designed to compete with FORTRAN. The first version, which became known as ALGOL 58, was replaced in 1960 with ALGOL 60. ALGOL was never as widely accepted as FORTRAN.
COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was created in 1960 to serve as the primary language for large-scale programs in government and business. COBOL is still in use on many computer systems today.
http://www.yi.com/home/HegartyJohn/cobol/index.html
In 1964, the BASIC language (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was first used. With BASIC, programming became available to a much wider range of people.
In 1965, a language called PL/I was developed in hopes of being everything to everyone. It was designed to be used for both scientific and business purposes. PL/I was kind of a combination of COBOL, FORTRAN, and ALGOL 60. PL/I proved to be too complex. It met with only partial success.
Simula I and Simula 67 are languages that had little very little impact in their time. However, Simula introduced the early concepts of object-oriented programming that influenced languages to come, such as C++.
In the late 1960s, a Swiss professor named Niklaus Wirth developed a teaching language called Pascal. Pascal, and its successor Modula-2, introduced important concepts of programming structure that reduce errors and increase readability.
http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/
Ada is a language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in an attempt to standardize the languages used for DOD projects. Ada, which was developed in 1983, is large and complex.
Smalltalk is more than a programming language. Smalltalk represents a departure from the languages that preceeded it. Smalltalk is graphical and object-oriented. While Smalltalk is not as widely used as C++, the concepts developed with Smalltalk were important to the development and continued development of languages like C++ and Java.
The C language was derived from ALGOL. And, of course, C++ is C with the addition of object-oriented concepts.
Other Web sites with information about the history of programming:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~samr/CS68.97W/Outlines/Nodes/plang-history.html
http://enteract.com/~bradapp/links/prog-langs.html#Prog_Langs