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Programming Languages - Current and Historical, Nemanja Cvejić

The document discusses the history and evolution of programming languages from the 1950s to present. It describes several important early languages like Fortran and Algol and how newer languages like Python, Java, C++, and Swift were developed. It also predicts that purpose-built declarative languages may become more prominent over general-purpose languages in the future.

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Nemanja Cvejic
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49 views10 pages

Programming Languages - Current and Historical, Nemanja Cvejić

The document discusses the history and evolution of programming languages from the 1950s to present. It describes several important early languages like Fortran and Algol and how newer languages like Python, Java, C++, and Swift were developed. It also predicts that purpose-built declarative languages may become more prominent over general-purpose languages in the future.

Uploaded by

Nemanja Cvejic
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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PROGRAMMING

LANGUAGES
Current and historical

Student: Nemanja Cvejić IT63/18


Professor: prof. dr. Jelisaveta Šafranj
INTRODUCTION
Since the invention of Charles Babbage’s analytical engine
in 1837, computers have always needed instructions to
perform tasks— instructions that come in the form of
coding languages.
Beginning more than 150 years ago with Ada Lovelace’s
translation algorithm, one thing is constant about these
languages: they are constantly evolving. Newer and better
features are continuously introduced, and the result is a
staggering number of coding languages that all serve
different, specific purposes.
DEFINITION OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
• A programming language is a formal language comprising a set of instructions that produce
various kinds of output. Programming languages are used in computer programming to
implement algorithms.

• Most programming languages consist of instructions for computers. There are


programmable machines that use a set of specific instructions, rather than general
programming languages.

• The description of a programming language is usually split into the two components
of syntax (form) and semantics (meaning).

• Some languages are defined by a specification document (for example, the C programming


language is specified by an ISO Standard) while other languages (such as Perl) have a
dominant implementation that is treated as a reference. Some languages have both, with the
basic language defined by a standard and extensions taken from the dominant
implementation being common.
“First, solve the problem. Then write the code.”

—JOHN JOHNSON, Michigan


Community College professor
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES THEN AND NOW
With decades of innovation at its core, the history of programming languages makes for a highly complex
family tree.

1950s
o Autocode (1952): This family of “simplified coding systems” was created in the 1950s specifically for
use with the digital computers at the universities of Manchester, Cambridge and London. Considered
by many to be the first complied programming language ever invented, Autocode was developed by
Alick Glennie to be both comprehensible and high-level.

o Fortran (1957): Fortran is a general-purpose, imperative programming language suited to numeric


computation and scientific computing. In use for over half a century, Fortran was developed by IBM in
1957 for both scientific and engineering applications.

1960s
o Algol 68 (1968): Short for Algorithmic Language 1968, Algol 68 was an imperative programming
language designed as a successor to Algol 60. With a wider scope of application and rigorously defined
syntax, this language was the first to be fully defined before it was implemented.
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES THEN AND NOW
1970s
o Pascal (1970): Named in honor of the French mathematician Blaise
Pascal, this programing language was developed by Niklaus Wirth.
Pascal enabled programmers to define their own complex datatypes and
made it easier to build dynamic and recursive data structures like lists,
trees and graphs.

o C (1972): One of the most widely used programming languages of all


time, C is a general-purpose language designed for structured
programming. C program source text is free-format, using the semicolon
as a statement terminator and curly braces for grouping blocks of
statements.
1980’s
o C++ (1980): This programming language was designed mainly for system programming but has expanded to
be used in desktop, servers and performance-critical applications. It inherited most of C’s syntax and has
imperative, object-oriented and generic programming features.
o Perl (1987): Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose programming languages. It borrows features from
other programming languages, such as C, AWK and sed. Originally, the only documentation for Perl was a
single manual page, but it has gone through several revisions and changes.
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES THEN AND NOW
1990s
o Python (1991): Python’s design philosophy focuses on
readability. A successor to the ABC language, its syntax allows
programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than is
possible in languages such as C++ or Java.

o Java (1995): This programming language was designed to have


as few implementation dependencies as possible, giving it a
wide variety of applications. It is intended to let application
developers “write once, run anywhere,” so that Java can run on
any platform that supports it without the need to recompile.

o PHP (1995): PHP is a server-side scripting language used for


both Web development and general-purpose programming. This
language can be mixed with HTML code or used in combination
with templating engines and Web frameworks. It was originally
not meant to be a programming language, but grew organically
over time.
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES THEN AND NOW
2000s
C# (2001): This multi-paradigm programming language was developed by Microsoft within
the .NET framework. It was intended to be simple, modern and object-oriented. The most recent
version of C# was released in 2012.

Visual Basic .NET (2001): A successor to the original Visual Basic language, Visual Basic .NET
is a high-level programming language implemented on the .NET framework. It uses statements to
specify actions and is one of the two main languages targeting the .NET framework, along with
Visual C#.

2010s-Present
Swift (2014): Swift was created by Apple for iOS and OS C development. It was introduced in
2014 at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Designed to work with Apple’s Cocoa and
Cocoa Touch frameworks, Swift is meant to be more concise and resilient to erroneous code.
THE FUTURE OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
Developers are moving away from managing physical servers to calling APIs that touch storage, computer,
and networking resources. In turn, developers are trying to automate everything as code through static
configurations, scripts, and files. Such automation would be easier if developers had programming
languages that matched the task at hand, but they don't. So, using a general purpose language like Java, a
developer might invest thousands of lines of code to try to express business logic and mostly fail. To solve
for this, we're seeing companies like HashiCorp (HCL) and oso (Polar) release special-purpose declarative
languages.
Even at the risk of programming language proliferation, this feels like the right way forward: Purpose-
built instead of general-purpose languages. However, we're likely to see many of these programming
languages rise and fall before we settle into a useful set of standard declarative languages.
THANK YOU FOR
YOUR ATTENTION

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