Programming has drastically changed the civilization. Now-a-days, all the highly recommended information & technology depend on it. It has brought a huge change almost all fields of modern science. Programming Languages are those which are used to operate Programming related tasks. There are many programming languages. Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, C#, C, Ruby, Swift etc are some of the most popular of Programming Languages. The Languages were never invented overnight. There is a huge history behind it.
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. 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 Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. The first high-level language to have an associated compiler was created by Corrado Böhm in 1951, for his PhD thesis. The first commercially available language was FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), developed in 1956 (first manual appeared in 1956, but first developed in 1954) by a team led by John Backus at IBM.
During 1842–1849, Ada Lovelace translated the memoir of Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea about Charles Babbage’s newest proposed machine: the Analytical Engine; she supplemented the memoir with notes that specified in detail a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the engine, unrecognized by most of historians as the world’s first published computer program. 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.
In the early 1950s, Alick Glennie developed Autocode, possibly the first compiled programming language, at the University of Manchester. In 1954, a second iteration of the language, known as the “Mark 1 Autocode,” was developed for the Mark 1 by R. A. Brooker. Brooker also developed an autocode for the Ferranti Mercury in the 1950s in conjunction with the University of Manchester.
The 1960s and 1970s also saw considerable debate over the merits of “structured programming”, which essentially meant programming without the use of “goto”. Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:
- 1967 — BCPL (forerunner to B)
- 1968 — Logo
- 1969 — B (forerunner to C)
- 1970 — Pascal
- 1970 — Forth
- 1972 — C
- 1972 — Smalltalk
- 1972 — Prolog
- 1973 — ML
- 1975 — Scheme
- 1978 — SQL (a query language, later extended)
The 1980s were years of relative consolidation in imperative languages. Rather than inventing new paradigms, all of these movements elaborated upon the ideas invented in the previous decade. C++ combined object-oriented and systems programming. The 1980s also brought advances in programming language implementation. The RISC movement in computer architecture postulated that hardware should be designed for compilers rather than for human assembly programmers. Aided by processor speed improvements that enabled increasingly aggressive compilation techniques, the RISC movement sparked greater interest in compilation technology for high-level languages.
Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:
- 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)
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 JavaScript programming language rose to popularity because of its early integration with the Netscape Navigator web browser. Various other scripting languages achieved widespread use in developing customized applications for web servers such as PHP. The 1990s saw no fundamental novelty in imperative languages, but much recombination and maturation of old ideas. This era began the spread of functional languages. A big driving philosophy was programmer productivity. Many “rapid application development” (RAD) languages emerged, which usually came with an IDE, garbage collection, and were descendants of older languages. All such languages were object-oriented. These included Object Pascal, Visual Basic, and Java. Java in particular received much attention.
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 — JavaScript
- 1995 — PHP
- 1997 — Rebol
Programming language evolution continues, in both industry and research. Some of the recent trends have included. Some notable languages developed during period of (2000- Present) include:
- 2000 — ActionScript
- 2001 — C#
- 2001 — D
- 2002 — Scratch
- 2003 — Groovy
- 2003 — Scala
- 2005 — F#
- 2006 — PowerShell
- 2007 — Clojure
- 2009 — Go
- 2010 — Rust
- 2011 — Dart
- 2011 — Kotlin
- 2011 — Elixir
- 2012 — Julia
- 2012 — TypeScript
- 2014 — Swift
The demand of Programming increasing day by day. New languages are invented for new purpose & develop the sphere of technology.
