HISTORY OF LANGUAGES

Programming during the early stages of the computers meant having to work with one and zeros and even going further to the concept of switch panelling. A series of developments lead to the types of advanced programming languages we use today. After development of the electronic computers in the early 40’s a German engineer named Konrad Zuse developed the Plankalkul. The Plankalkul is a system of symbols that could be adopted in the step by step solving of problems in the PC.Alan Turing was among the first to recognize that programming in machine language would limit the speed and ease 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.

However a code called short code was later developed by john Mauchly, though it was cryptic it still allowed equations to be inserted with the help of a special kind of code. It was based on this new idea and code methodology that Grace Murray hopper created the first real advocate of creating higher-level languages.

http://www.uta.fi/~majyho/guru/Hopper.html

In the early 1950’s IBM developed the FORTAN. FORTAN stands for formula translator and its basic function was to work in hand with mathematical problems.

http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~limt/fortran.html

FORTAN in 1958 was completed with a new programme called ALGOL meaning Algorithm Language. This language was developed to work hand in hand with the FORTAN. It was later accepted to be 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 Defence in an attempt to standardize the languages used for DOD projects. Ada, which was developed in 1983, is large and complex.
http://www.adahome.com/
Smalltalk is more than a programming language. Smalltalk represents a departure from the languages that preceded 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.

Blog#3 Majed Alharbi