History of Programming Languages

• IBM Laboratoria
• John Backus
• Started in 1954, first compiler: 1958

• Developed for scientific-numeric purposes
• The inheritance from the past is a big burden on the language.
• The recent FORTRAN-90 standard provides support for structured programming.

• Designed for the manipulation of symbols and patterns (characters, words,...)
• Functional language, based on the backtracking paradigm.
• Contrary to an array in procedural languages, a list is the primary build-in datastructure.
• One of the most popular languages for Artificial Intelligence.

• USA army
• Colonel Gracy Hopper
• 1959

• Designed for administrative purposes. The project served to demonstrate that it was possible to program a computer using plain English, which was considered as an ideal at that time.
• Basically unstructured, although some versions now even provide support for object oriented programming in some form of cobol.
• Still very widely used for administrative purposes (cfr. the Y2K and Euro issues)
• The language provides a lot of feature oriented towards records and large files.

• One of the goals was to combine FORTRAN and COBOL (which turn out to be a monumental failure). It was better than COBOL but not as efficient as FORTRAN.
• The language was pretty well structured for its time, but was overly complex for the moderate programmer.
• Disappeared completely.

• Edsger Dijksta, Nicolaus Wirth, Naur
• 1958

• Designed to be the successor of FORTRAN (which didn't succeed).
• Strongly structured, very powerful and elegant
• Algol has never really made it, but the language stood model for almost all following languages. This language had a major impact on the evolution of programming languages.

• Dartmounth College (New Hampshire, USA)
• J. Kemeny and T. Kurtz
• 1965
• First BASIC compiler: 1985 (Microsoft QuickBasic)

• BASIC was specifically oriented towards hobbyist, to let them experiment with programming and to let them solve small and simple problems.
• Originally, the language was interpreted but soon also compilers were developed.
• The language was completely unstructured and very poorly typed, but became popular again in its object oriented reincarnation as Microsoft Visual Basic, which was used as the basis for Visual Basic.NET.
• In the early days there were thousands of dialects.

• Ole-Johan Dahl, Kristen Nygaard (Norway)
• 1967

• Designed for simulation and modeling purposes, however, the language could be used as a general-purpose language.
• First language with object oriented features.
• Was never really successful.

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 1968
• Seymour Papert

• Alain Colmerauer (University of Aix-Marseille), Philipe Roussel (University of Aix-Marseille) and Robert Kowalski (University of Edinburgh)
• 1972

• A logic-language based on logical rewrite systems
• Used for automatic proof verification systems and other Artifical Intelligence applications.

• Nicolaus Wirth
• 1971

• Designed to be an educational language (simple, a lot of datatypes,...)
• Very well structured but provides very poor I/O facilities.

• Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
• University of Utah
• Project leaders: Alan Kay, Daniel Ingalls
• Project members: Adele Goldberg, David Robson,...
• 1972

• "The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to support children of all ages in the world of information. The challenge is to identify and harness metaphors of sufficient simplicity and powers to allow a single person to have access to, and creative control over, information which ranges from number and text through sounds and images" (Daniel Ingalls).
• Small provides not only for a language but also for a completely development environment (graphical browser, tools, very extensive library,...)
• This is an extreme object oriented language ("Everything is an Object"), which is completely dynamic, interpreted (and thus rather slow) and allows for very fast programming (very well suited for prototyping).

• CPL: developed by the Universities of Cambridge and London
• BCPL (Basic CPL): Martin Richards
• B: Ken Thompson (Bell Labs)
• C: Dennis Ritchie (Bell Labs, 1969-1971)

• C was designed to be a language for own usage, most importantly, to develop the operating system Unix.
• It was the first language designed by programmers, very well structured, powerful, portable and flexible. However, it allows for very cryptic expressions, and dirty "pointer" hunting.
• One of the most powerful languages of all times, used for almost all purposes (operating systems, wordprocessors, databases, games, computeranimations in movies,...

History of C

A more detailed note about the evolution of one of the most popular programming languages ever.

• Guy Lewis Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman
• 1975

• Named after the first female programmer, lady Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron) and co-worker of Charles Babbage.
• The code name of the project was "Green".

• Based on the specifications of the USA Department of Defense (DoD).
• Jean Ichbiah, Bernd Krieg-Brueckner, Brian Wichmann, Henry Ledgard, Jean-Claude Heliard, Jean-Loup Gailly, Jean-Raymond Abrial, John Barnes, Mike Woodger, Olivier Roubine, A. Schuman & S.C. Vestal
• 1983

• The goal was to develop a common, powerful language that could be used by all official (governamental) institutes of the USA.
• Very well structured and very powerful, with a lot of features that are missing from other languages (f.i., real-time, parallel and distributed systems).
• Ada is an object based language (Ada-9x adds object oriented features).
• Nowadays still used in some governamental USA institutes.

• AT&T Bell Labs
• Bjarne Stroustrup
• 1985

• Bjarne Stroustrup wanted to add object oriented facilities (from Simula) to the popular C language.
• C++ has a lot of features for very big software projects.
• Standardized by ANSI/ISO, including a standard library (STL, Standard Template Library)
• One of the most popular object oriented languages.

• Brad Cox
• 1986

• Also Brad Cox wanted to add object oriented facilities to the popular C language, but based his features on the dynamic Smalltalk system.
• Objective-C does not extend any existing C-keyword as C++ does (f.i. struct).
• Provides a very extensive library.
• Could never compete with C++.

• Bertrand Meyer
• 1986

• Development of a Software Engineering Tool.
• Comes with a complete development environment (graphic browser, tools, library,...)
• Was never really successful, but very influential from a theoretical point of view.

• Apple Computer and Nicolaus Wirth
• 1986

• Adds object oriented features to Pascal.
• The popular graphical development environment Borland Delphi is based on this language.

• Daniel Bobrow, Sonya Keene, Linda DeMichiel, Patrick Dussud, Richard Gabriel, James Kempf, Gregor Kicazles & David Moon
• 1988

• Standardize object oriented dialects of Common Lisp.

• Indian dance
• Island
• Hot drink
• The project name was Oak, named after the big oak that could be seen from the development office.

• Sun Microsystems
• James Gosling
• 1994

• A combination of C++ and Smalltalk.
• (Almost) Everything is an Object.
• Removes some complexities of C++, such as pointers and memory management (by providing a garbage collector).
• Tightly linked with the Internet (WWW), mainly because of the "applets", small Java programs that run directly into a browser.
• Developed to be as portable as possible, "Write once, run everywhere".