Evolution of Code
I always wondered about how coding languages came about and how many languages are out there. I figured it started somewhere from math, logic, algorithms, the question ‘true or false’, and zero’s and one’s.
Well of course, coding goes hand and hand with computers. The first modern recognizable computers coming along in the 1940’s.
The first programming languages designed to communicate instructions to a computer were written in the 1950s.
- 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
- 1962 — APL
- 1962 — Simula
- 1962 — SNOBOL
- 1963 — CPL (forerunner to C)
- 1964 — Speakeasy (computational environment)
- 1964 — BASIC
- 1964 — PL/I
- 1966 — JOSS
- 1967 — BCPL (forerunner to C)
From the late 1960’s through the 70’s a spawn of programming languages were established. Along with them were some influential language paradigms now in use today.
- Speakeasy, 1964 -FORTRAN fondation, Object Oriented
- Simula, late 1960’s -First language to support Object Oriented Progamming
- C, 1969
- Smalltalk, mid 1970’s -Again, Object Oriented completely from the ground up
- Prolog, 1972 -First logic programming language
- ML, 1973 -built on top of list, statically typed functional programming language
In the 1980’s, new languages did not bring new paradigms, instead they were consolidated. For example C++ combined object oriented and systems programming.
- 1980 — C++ (as C with classes, renamed in 1983)
- 1983 — Ada
- 1984 — Common Lisp
- 1984 — MATLAB
- 1984 — dBase III, dBase III Plus (Clipper and FoxPro as FoxBASE, later developing into Visual FoxPro
- 1985 — Eiffel
- 1986 — Objective-C
- 1986 — LabVIEW (Visual Programming Language)
- 1986 — Erlang
- 1987 — Perl
- 1988 — Tcl
- 1988 — Wolfram Language(as part of Mathematica, only got a separate name in June 2013)
- 1989 — FL (Backus)
1990’s -Age of the internet!
The theme was programmer productivity. (RAD) languages emerged -Rapid Application Development. These languages were object-oriented. Java received much attention.
- 1990 — Haskell
- 1991 — 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 — JavaScript
- 1995 — PHP
- 1997 — Rebol
We continue to see programming languages evolve. Recent trends are increasing support for functional programming, making code easier to read, i.e. “Ruby”. Adding security and reliability verification, composability and modularity, database integration, open source, visual programming languages.
