Fortran

In 1957, the first of the major languages appeared in the form of FORTRAN. FORTRAN was the first programming language that significantly rose above the level of assembly language. Its name stands for FORmula TRANslating system. The language was designed at IBM for scientific computing. The main innovation of FORTRAN was that it became possible to use ordinary mathematical notation in expressions. FORTRAN also had subroutines (a form of procedure or function), arrays, formatted input and output, and declarations that gave programmers explicit control over the placement of variables and arrays in memory. However, that was about it. Today, this language would be considered restrictive as it only included IF, DO, and GOTO statements, but at the time, these commands were a big step forward.

Nevertheless, the advantages of the abstraction quickly won over most programmers: quicker and more reliable development, and less machine dependence since register and machine instructions are abstracted away. The basic types of data in use today got their start in FORTRAN, these included logical variables (TRUE or FALSE), and integer, real, and double-precision numbers. Because most early computing was on scientific problems, FORTRAN became the standard language in science and engineering, and is only now being replaced by other languages.

COBOL

Though FORTAN was good at handling numbers, it was not so good at handling input and output, which mattered most to business computing. Business computing started to take off in 1959, and because of this, COBOL was developed. The language was designed by a committee consisting of representatives of the US Department of Defense, computer manufacturers and commercial organizations such as insurance companies. The primary designer of COBOL was Grace Murray Hopper, an important computer pioneer.

COBOL was intended to be only a short-range solution until a better design could be created; instead, the language as defined quickly became the most widespread language in its field (as FORTRAN has in science), and for a similar reason: the language provides a natural means of expressing computations that are typical in its field, although current versions of FORTRAN and COBOL differ substantially from forms of these languages of the 1950s. Business data processing is characterized by the need to do relatively simple calculations on vast numbers of complex data records, and COBOL’s data structuring capabilities far surpass those of algorithmic languages like FORTRAN or C. It also allowed for these to be grouped into arrays and records, so that data could be tracked and organized better. It is interesting to note that a COBOL program is built in a way similar to an essay, with four or five major sections that build into an elegant whole. COBOL statements also have a very English-like grammar, making it quite easy to learn. All of these features were designed to make it easier for the average business to learn and adopt it.

LISP

In 1958, John McCarthy of MIT created the LISt Processing (or LISP) language. It was designed for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Since it was designed for a specialized field, the original release of LISP had a unique syntax: essentially none. Programmers wrote code in parse trees, which are usually a compiler-generated intermediary between higher syntax (such as in C or Java) and lower-level code. Another obvious difference between this language (in original form) and other languages is that the basic and only type of data is the list; in the mid-1960s, LISP acquired other data types. A LISP list is denoted by a sequence of items enclosed by parentheses. LISP programs themselves are written as a set of lists, so that LISP has the unique ability to modify itself, and hence grow on its own. LISP remains in use today because of its highly specialized and abstract nature.

Pascal

Pascal was begun in 1968 by Niklaus Wirth. Its development was mainly out of necessity for a good teaching tool. The motivation for Pascal was to create a language that could be used to demonstrate ideas about type declarations and type checking. In the beginning, the language designers had no hopes for it to enjoy widespread adoption. Instead, they concentrated on developing good tools for teaching such as a debugger and editing system and support for common early microprocessor machines which were in use in teaching institutions.

Pascal was designed in a very orderly approach, it combined many of the best features of the languages in use at the time, COBOL, FORTRAN, and ALGOL. While doing so, many of the irregularities and oddball statements of these languages were cleaned up, which helped it gain users. The combination of features, input/output and solid mathematical features, made it a highly successful language. Pascal also improved the “pointer” data type, a very powerful feature of any language that implements it. It also added a CASE statement, that allowed instructions to branch like a tree.

Pascal also helped the development of dynamic variables, which could be created while a program was being run, through the NEW and DISPOSE commands. However, Pascal did not implement dynamic arrays, or groups of variables, which proved to be needed and led to its downfall. Wirth later created a successor to Pascal, Modula-2, but by the time it appeared, C was gaining popularity and users at a rapid pace.

C

C was developed by Dennis Ritchie of Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s as an implementation language for the UNIX operating system. Operating systems were traditionally written in assembly language because high-level languages were considered inefficient. C abstracts away the details of assembly language programming by offering structured control statements and data structures (arrays and records), while at the same time it retains all the flexibility of low-level programming in assembly language (pointers and bit-level operations).

Since UNIX was readily available to universities, and since it is written in a portable language rather than in raw assembly language, it quickly became the system of choice in academic and research institutions. When new computers and applications moved from these institutions to the commercial marketplace, they took UNIX and C with them.

C is designed to be close to assembly language so it is extremely flexible; the problem is that this flexibility makes it extremely easy to write programs with obscure bugs because unsafe constructs are not checked by the compiler as they would be in Pascal. C is a sharp tool when used expertly on small programs, but can cause serious trouble when used on large software systems developed by teams of varying ability.

The C language was standardized in 1989 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI); essentially the same standard was adopted by the International Standards Organization (ISO) a year later.

C++

In the 1980s Bjarne Stroustrup, also from Bell Laboratories, used C as the basis of the C++ (known as “C With Classes”) language, extending C to include support for object-oriented programming similar to that provided by the Simula language. In addition, C++ fixes many mistakes in C and should be used in preference to C, even on small programs where the object-oriented features may not be needed.

C++ is an evolving language and the natural language to use when upgrading a system written in C.

Java

In the early 1990s, interactive TV was the technology of the future. Sun Microsystems decided that interactive TV needed a special, portable (can run on many types of machines), language. This language eventually became Java. In 1994, the Java project team changed their focus to the Web, which was becoming “the cool thing” after interactive TV failed. The next year, Netscape licensed Java for use in their internet browser, Navigator. At this point, Java became the language of the future and several companies announced applications which would be written in Java, none of which came into use.

Though Java has very lofty goals and is a text-book example of a good language, it may be the “language that wasn’t.” It has serious optimization problems, meaning that programs written in it run very slowly. And Sun has hurt Java’s acceptance by engaging in political battles over it with Microsoft. But Java may wind up as the instructional language of tomorrow as it is truly object-oriented and implements advanced techniques such as true portability of code and garbage collection.

Visual Basic is often taught as a first programming language today as it is based on the BASIC language developed in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. BASIC is a very limited language and was designed for non-computer science people. Statements are chiefly run sequentially, but program control can change based on IF..THEN, and GOSUB statements which execute a certain block of code and then return to the original point in the program’s flow.

Microsoft has extended BASIC in its Visual Basic (VB) product. The heart of VB is the form, or blank window on which you drag and drop components such as menus, pictures, and slider bars. These items are known as “widgets.” Widgets have properties (such as its color) and events (such as clicks and double-clicks) and are central to building any user interface today in any language. VB is most often used today to create quick and simple interfaces to other Microsoft products such as Excel and Access without needing a lot of code, though it is possible to create full applications with it.

Perl

Perl has often been described as the “duct tape of the Internet, ” because it is most often used as the engine for a Web interface or in scripts that modify configuration files. It has very strong text matching functions which make it ideal for these tasks. Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 because the UNIX sed and awk tools (used for text manipulation) were no longer strong enough to support his needs. Depending on whom you ask, Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language or Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.

Programming languages have been under development for years and will remain so for many years to come. They got their start with a list of steps to wire a computer to perform a task. These steps eventually found their way into software and began to acquire newer and better features. The first major languages were characterized by the simple fact that they were intended for one purpose and one purpose only, while the languages of today are differentiated by the way they are programmed in, as they can be used for almost any purpose. And perhaps the languages of tomorrow will be more natural with the invention of quantum and biological computers.

Notes:

Sed – потоковый редактор

Awk – язык обработки шаблонов

Charles Babbage (1791-1871) – английский математик, изо­бре­татель первой аналитической вычислительной машины

ENIAC – первый электронный цифровой компьютер

John von Neumann (1903–1957) – венгеро-американский ма­тематик, с его именем связывают архитектуру большинства современных компьютеров

Artificial Intelligence – искусственный интеллект

UNIX - семейство переносимых, многозадачных, много­пользовательских операционных систем

Widget – примитив графического интерфейса пользователя