Good day buddies, I hope you enjoyed your weekend? I will like to officially welcome you to another interesting field and the basis of computing.
Don’t expect me to start with the definition of programming language or what is a programming language or what is the importance of computer programming languages, in fact, I will assume that we are all programmers, though I will not say a developer.
No doubt,
If (you are reading this post && you have an account with steemit && you have been writing and getting upvotes from SteemStem)
{
Print ‘You must have written little code when structuring the content of your article:’;
Print ‘You must have written or familiar with HTML tag’;
Print ‘No doubt, you must have linked your Labeled for reuse image to its source before’;
Print ‘No doubt, you must have been engaging with the SteemStem community’;
If (you have done at least one of these before)
{
It suffices to say you are not new to programming and as such you don’t have to be told that programming is a set of instruction written in a particular order in order to accomplish a task;
}
Else
Print ‘You need to work more on structuring the content of your post in order to enhance its readability and visibility;
}
Ooh, sorry for bothering you with a simple If-else structure as I don't have the intention of doing it here today, but if you can decode all have written so far, then programming must be simple to you.
History and Evolution of Programming Languages
Ever wonder who first introduced programming language, what lead to the programming language and how did programming language evolved.
with the history of a computer, which actually starts 2000 years ago, then the basis of programming language can be traced back to the era before since things do not always exist without a prototype
The basis and foundation of Computer Programming Languages can be traced back to the work of Joseph-Marie Jacquard called ‘The Jacquard system’ which was developed in France between 1804-1805, this serves as an improvement on the initial punched card developed by Jacques de Vaucanson's loom in 1745. Though this cannot be referred to as programming language in today’s information and communication technology world since it did not perform computation and logic function, it served as a basis which eventually lead to Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, and Lovelace Ada 1842 deconstruction of his work which led to the first computer program.
Let's watch how it works here
Although, Charles Babbage did not develop or write down an explicit set of instructions for his analytical engine in the form of a modern computer program. However, his program was showing the lists of states during their execution and what operator was run at each step.
Unlike the Jacquard system which did not perform both computation and logic function. The Analytical Engine was designed to have incorporated an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and flow of control which is in the form of conditional-branching and repetitive loops. It was incorporated with integrated memory, though Charles Babbage was never able to complete the construction of any of his machines due to the conflicts he had with his engineer and inadequate funding but it served as the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete.
--- After the Jacquard system and Charles Babbage work, it took almost 100 years before the invention of the first electrical programmable computers, though the machine close assembly language which makes use of mnemonics was invented in the 1940s, it was probably the first human-readable computer programming language. --- --- No doubt, the design and development of what we can call ‘the first computer languages’ started between 1940-1950. From machine code to assembler language was a natural step which took almost five years of work to produce what we can call Fortran 1 ---By 1950s computer engineers had the perception that machine –close assembly language was error-prone and too laborious to develop the entire systems and this lead to the development of the first modern programming language in 1955: FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator), ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language), LISP (LISt Processor) and COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) followed in the next few years and the rest is history.
Research has made it known that almost every language in use today is a descendant or derived from one of these aforementioned first four modern programming languages and indeed, FORTRAN, COBOL, and LISP are still actively used by large in industry.
The 1980s
Below programming languages were created and dominated the industry in the 1980s
Date | Programming Language |
---|---|
1980 | C++ (as C with classes, renamed in 1983) |
1983 | Ada |
1984 | Common Lisp |
1984 | MATLAB |
1984 | dBase III, dBase III Plus |
1985 | Eiffel |
1986 | Objective-C |
1986 | LabVIEW (Visual Programming Language) |
1986 | Erlang |
1987 | Perl |
1988 | Tcl |
1988 | Wolfram Language (as part of Mathematica, only got a separate name in June 2013) |
1989 | FL (Backus) |
The 1990s: the Internet age
Below programming languages were created and dominated the industry in the 1990s
Date | Programming Language |
---|---|
1990 | Haskell |
1991 | Python |
1991 | Visual Basic |
1993 | Lua |
1993 | R |
1994 | CLOS (part of ANSI Common Lisp) |
1995 | Ruby |
1995 | Ada 95 |
1995 | Java |
1995 | Delphi (Object Pascal) |
1995 | JavaScript |
1995 | PHP |
1997 | Rebol |
The 2000 and Beyond
Below programming languages were created and dominated the industry in the 2000 and beyond
Date | Programming Language |
---|---|
2000 | ActionScript |
2001 | C# |
2001 | D |
2002 | Scratch |
2003 | Groovy |
2003 | Scala |
2005 | F# |
2006 | PowerShell |
2007 | Clojure |
2009 | Go |
2010 | Rust |
2011 | Dart |
2011 | Kotlin |
2011 | Red |
2011 | Elixir |
2012 | Julia |
2014 | Swift |
2016 | Ring |
Conclusions
Most times, the history of the computer is usually detailed in terms of the size, generation (hardware technology), purpose and data process, Computing is not just about hardware technology (electronics), there is always another side to the coin.
Computing world can also be viewed in terms of programming and the history and evolution of programming languages contains much of the real story of computing.
Thanks for reading through, your thoughts are important.
Until my next post,
keep on sending zeroes and ones.
References
1801: Punched cards control Jacquard loom
Analytical Engine
History of programming languages
Jacquard loom
History of Computer Languages - The Classical Decade, 1950s
All images are from free source websites
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Creativity is one art of good writing and that you have shown in this article. It makes me wonder how good you will even be with coding.
It was really informative and educative walking down the Memory Lane of the world of coding.
Like you noted, programming has really aided in revolutionizing our world. It won't be an exaggeration to say we owe a lot of today's technology to the advancement in programming.
Well done sir.
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Thank you engineer, it is always great to here from you. Your comments and commitment here and there show how knowledgeable and committed you are, very impressive. Keep it up.
Regards.
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Thanks for the kind words. I'm honored to be recognised you.
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Very good article. Having worked with many of these languages, I really enjoy looking at the evolution of programming languages. I started with C and C++ but also around that time I was working with Common Lisp. For a while, I also worked with the old Fortran, Smalltalk, Python and Perl.
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Nice to see an experienced programmer like you here sir, looking forward to learning more coding from you soon.
Evolution of programming languages is often overlooked in the computing world.
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The way I see it, the more languages I know, the more tools in my belt. As a result, I have been fairly language agnostic for the past 20+ years as a freelance programmer.
Many of the developers I work with, know like 2-3 languages max and they swear by them. I personally don't have a specific language that I really think is a good catch all for all of the use-cases that I end up working on (Not like those JavaScript devotees who try to use it everywhere). Every language has its own set of Use Cases and Niches for the most part; except in cases where the newer language is basically just an upgraded version of the older one (the Lisps, ALGOL, ML etc).
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You just explained it all, many times the project at hand determines the kind of programming to learn and make use since each programming has its limitation. It is good to have that kind of your experience at times in order to be fittingly fit in the industry. I'm sure with your experience in the aforementioned programming languages, you will easily adapt to any new language. Regards
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Good article written. Actually have not read to this extent of the history of how programming started but I have little idea of programming. You started with python where you are using "print" "if" and "else". Thanks for enlightening me more on programming.
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Thanks for the nice comment,
The If- else structure I used can easily be used by Phython as you said and any C-related Program.
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Wow my perception of the timeline of these languages is all messed up. I felt like finding out suddenly I was 70 years old... I just felt like Python, for example, was only 5-10 years old!
shakes head
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The popularity and Industrial usage of a programming language always determine the first impression until one research further. Just like you said about Python, Despite the fact that Python was launched in 1991, almost 27 years ago, It gained wide popularity and wide usage in the past 5-8 years simply because of his usage in the Industry as well as academics, especially its recent and widespread usage in Machine Learning.
Nice to hear from you Sir.
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I thought initially Rust is newer than Julia :) Thanks for the info.
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It's my pleasure sir. Nice to hear you.
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so creative @noble-noah ,programming is a great concept ,i could remember my days learning automation ,you have to code on alien brandly ,siemiens plc e.t.c
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