By : ‫مصباح سامح عبدالعزيز مصطفى‬

The Evolution of Programming Languages

Programming Language is indeed the fundamental unit of today’s tech world. It is considered as the set
of commands and instructions that we give to the machines to perform a particular task. For example, if
you give some set of instructions to add two numbers then the machine will do it for you and tell you the
correct answer accordingly. But do you know that Programming Languages are having a long and rich
history of their evolution? And with a similar concern, here in this article, we’ll take a look at the
evolution of Programming Languages over the period.

In the computer world, we have about 500+ programming languages with having their own syntax and
features. And if you type who’s the father of the computer, then the search engine will show you the
result as to Charles Babbage but the father of the computer didn’t write the first code. It was Ada
Lovelace who has written the first-ever computer programming language and the year was 1883.

1883: The Journey starts from here…!!

 In the early days, Charles Babbage had made the device, but he was confused about how to give
instructions to the machine, and then Ada Lovelace wrote the instructions for the analytical
engine.

 The device was made by Charles Babbage and the code was written by Ada Lovelace for
computing Bernoulli’s number.

 First time in history that the capability of computer devices was judged.

1949: Assembly Language

 It is a type of low-level language.

 It mainly consists of instructions (kind of symbols) that only machines could understand.

 In today’s time also assembly language is used in real-time programs such as simulation flight
navigation systems and medical equipment eg – Fly-by-wire (FBW) systems.

 It is also used to create computer viruses.

1952: Autocode

 Developed by Alick Glennie.

 The first compiled computer programming language.

 COBOL and FORTRAN are the languages referred to as Autocode.

1957: FORTRAN

 Developers are John Backus and IBM.

  It was designed for numeric computation and scientific computing.

 Software for NASA probes voyager-1 (space probe) and voyager-2 (space probe) was originally
written in FORTRAN 5.

1958: ALGOL

 ALGOL stands for ALGOrithmic Language.

 The initial phase of the most popular programming languages of C, C++, and JAVA.

 It was also the first language implementing the nested function and has a simple syntax than
FORTRAN.

 The first programming language to have a code block like “begin” that indicates that your
program has started and “end” means you have ended your code.

1959: COBOL

 It stands for COmmon Business-Oriented Language.

 In 1997, 80% of the world’s business ran on Cobol.

 The US internal revenue service scrambled its path to COBOL-based IMF (individual master file)
in order to pay the tens of millions of payments mandated by the coronavirus aid, relief, and
economic security.

1964: BASIC

 It stands for beginners All-purpose symbolic instruction code.

 In 1991 Microsoft released Visual Basic, an updated version of Basic

 The first microcomputer version of Basic was co-written by Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte
Davidoff for their newly-formed company, Microsoft.

1972: C

 It is a general-purpose, procedural programming language and the most popular programming

language till now.

 All the code that was previously written in assembly language gets replaced by the C language
like operating system, kernel, and many other applications.

 It can be used in implementing an operating system, embedded system, and also on the website
using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI).

 C is the mother of almost all higher-level programming languages like C#, D, Go, Java, JavaScript,
Limbo, LPC, Perl, PHP, Python, and Unix’s C shell.

Some other programming languages that are popular among programmers are listed below.
YEAR OF PROGRAMMING
RELEASE LANGUAGES FACTS

SQL was developed at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and

SQL Raymond F. Boyce. The earlier name was SEQUEL (Structured
1972 English Query Language).

It stands for MATrix LABoratory. It is used for matrix

MATLAB manipulation, implementation of an algorithm, and creation of
1978 a user interface.

C++ is the fastest high-level programming language.

Objective-C, C++
1983 Earlier, Apple Inc uses Objective-C to make applications.

1990 Haskell It is a purely functional programming language.

The language is very easy to understand. Famous language

Python
1991 among data scientists and analysts.

JAVA is everywhere. JAVA is the platform-independent

language.

PHP is a scripting language mainly used in web programming for

JAVA, PHP, JavaScript connecting databases.

JavaScript enables interactive web pages. JS is the most popular

programming language. JS is famous for building a web
1995 application. It makes our page interactive.

C#(C-sharp) is mainly used for making games. Unity engine uses

C#
2000 C# for making amazing games for all platforms

GO language is developed in Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob

GO
2009 Pike, and Ken Thompson.
YEAR OF PROGRAMMING
RELEASE LANGUAGES FACTS

Kotlin is developed by JetBrains. It is used for making an android

Kotlin
2011 application.

Swift language is developed by Apple Inc. It is a general-purpose

Swift
2014 programming language.

References :
1. https://www.scriptol.com/programming/history.php
2. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/361454.361485
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages#References
4. https://divnotes.com/blog/history-of-computer-programming-languages
5. https://ipython.ai/evolution-programming-languages-history