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First language
Ada Lovelace and Babbage and its nephew were writing programs for the project of "difference engine",
and then the "analytical engine".
In 1945, the german K. Zuse, inventor of the Z3 computer would have defined an evolved language for this
engine (with arrays and records). Few documents of the epoch about this language exist.
Assembly
Assemblers exist since the beginning of computers. They associate a symbolic name to the machine-
language code, for example:
add bx, 4
cmp [adr], 3
jmp address
Assembly programming is no longer frequently practiced, even to build fast routines...
Autocode - 1952
Alick E. Glennie
Implemented firstly on Mark 1, then on other computers, this is a symbolic code.
IPL - 1956 - Information Processing Language
A. Newell, H. Simon, J.C. Shaw
Low-level list processing language. Implements the RECURSIVITY.
Fortran - 1954-1958 - FORmula TRANslator system
John Backus and other researchers at IBM
Language dedicated to mathematical calculations.
Fortran II (1958) introduced SUB-ROUTINES, FUNCTIONS, LOOPS, a primitive FOR control structure.
Identifiers were limited to six characters.
Lisp - 1958-1960 - LISt Processing
Mac Carthy
Functional language for list processing.
It is purely recursive, and not iterative. There is no difference between code and data.
IAL - 1958 - International Algebraic Logic
First name for Algol 58, never implemented.
Algol - 1960 / Algol W - 1966 / Algol 68 - ALGOrithmic Language
Defined by an international consortium of computer science specialists, coordinated by IFIP.
This was the fist universal language to be machine independent.
Introduces the use of the BNF (Backus Naur Form) grammar to create a syntax parser.
Introduces BLOCKS of STATEMENTS, and LOCAL VARIABLES inside a block.
Recursivity was implemented but with reticence as this was considered as useless!
Uses DYNAMIC ARRAYS, and this means that following language (Pascal, C) have regressed by using
static arrays, for better performance.
It has IF THEN ELSE, FOR, the := symbol for assignment (used then by Pascal), a SWITCH with gotos, the
BEGIN END markers, the WHILE loop.
Algol W by Niklaus Wirth in 1966 was using RECORDS, that are dynamic data structures, CASE, passing
parameters by value, precedence of operators.
The same year, Niklaus Wirth has created Euler, a language between Algol and Pascal.
Algol 60 was still oriented toward mathematical calculations. To try to reach the original goal of a general
purpose language, a new version has been started in 1964, Algol X, renamed further Algol 68.
Algol 68 was using the =+ sign to merge both assignment and add. It has introduced UNION and CAST of
types. It owns IF THEN ELIF FI, CASE, GOTO, user-defined operators.
Incremental compiling was not allowed.
Cobol - 1960 - COmmon Business Oriented Langage
Defined by a committee, the CODASYL, COnference on DAta SYsystems Languages
The committee under the auspices of the Department Of Defense, and manufacturers, universities and users,
worked from may 1959 to april 1960.
Grace Murray Hopper, who had designed Flow-Matic, a compiled language in the 50's, has participated to
the committee.
Cobol is a classical procedural language aimed at enterprise management, in wich a program is divided in 4
divisions: identification, environment, data, procedure, and they may be divided in sections. It was founded
on data and a program must describe precisely the hardware and input/ouput data format.
It introduced the RECORD data structure. Programs are documented by the syntax and are all but
ligthweight...
APL - 1964 - A Programming Language
K. Iverson
Language using a mathematical notation, with lot of operators. A unique type, the array.
Defined from 1957 to 1960, implemented in 1964.
Basic - 1964 - Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
John Kemeny, Thomas Kurtz
Has been designed in 1963, to be easy to learn and has been implemented in 1964. The first version was
compiled, then it becomes interactive and interpreted. Each line has a number to allow GOTOs statements to
jump to the line!
Bill Gate and Paul Allen have win an international contest by designing and implementing a fast and
compact Basic, firstly for the Altair (in 4 kb memory!) and then on other micro-computers.
Micro-computers were delivered with Basic in ROM until late 80.
In 1977, the Apple II was sold with an integer Basic. Then the Applesoft Basic of Microsoft with floating-
point. Applesoft was using two-letter identifiers! Sub-programs were called by GOSUB to line numbers.
The first PC from IBM, (in 1981) was using MS-DOS from Microsoft and its interpreted Basic (Basica). In
82 Microsoft produced its first compiled Basic (Quick Basic).
Pascal and C have replaced Basic in the same decade. Microsoft still uses Basic. Visual Basic for
application, ASP for the web, and applications are extended with a language (macro) that is basic also.
True Basic, by the original authors of the language is compiled and no longer uses line numbers.
Iswim - 1965 - If You See What I Mean
P. Landin
First purely fonctional language, in the mathematical sense. The first to use LAZY EVALUATION.
Attribute grammars - 1965
Donald Knuth
Completing the BNF method, attribute grammars describes the semantic of languages to be made of
functions. This type of grammar helps the building of compilers.
Simula 67 - 1962-67
Ole-Johan Dahl, Kristan Nygaard
The Simula project started in 1962. The goal was to build a tool to describe discrete event system, or
network, and a language to program simulating real world.
Was firstly designed as an Algol extension.
In 1964, Simula 1 has been implemented on Univac 1107. It was used to control administrations, airports,
planning, transport, or social systems.
This was a specialized tool. In 1966, it has been decided to make it an universal language. Several projects
has been launched with the help of several makers (IBM, Univac, Digital) and this leaded to Simula 67.
This universal language has introduced CLASSES, INHERITANCE and OBJECTS that are instances of
classes. Classes allow to link functions (methods) to objects.
Logo - 1966
Fuerzeig, Seymour Papert, and others
Aimed to teach programming to children, near Lisp, and based on moving a "turtle" on the screen.
Snobol 4 - 1967 - StroNg Oriented symBOlic Language
D. J. Farber, R. E. Griswold, F. P. Polensky at Bells Labs
Snobol appeared in 1962.
Snobol 4 is the first stable distributed version of Snobol, available in 1967.
This is a processor of strings, founded on the principle of pattern-matching, concatenation and alternation.
It was the first language to implement associative arrays, indexed by any type of keys.
It allows to run code stored inside strings.
Data types are: string, integer, real, array, table, pattern and user-defined types.
CPL - Combined Programming Language
Cambridge and London Universities
This was a combination of Algol 60 and functional language aimed at proof of theorems. It was using
polymorphic testing structures. Typed language with the "any" joker type. Had list and array.
Complex, was not implemented. I quote it only because it was a step toward the design of the C language.
This is a fully object oriented language wich runs always inside a graphical environnment, with windows,
mouse, etc...
C - 1973 - C is the successor of B, which is the successor of BCPL
Dennis Ritchie
It was firstly destinated to program the UNIX operating system, but has become quickly universal thanks to
its portability and speed.
Allows incremental compiling. In 1965, ATT programmers were using Bcpl to work on implementing
Unix. Displeased with this language, they made it evolve to a new version named B, then to a new language
named C.
This was the evolving of the hardware that instigate to create C. Bcpl and B was using integer for pointers,
but this was not working on the new computers.
Bcpl has no type (as Php or other modern scripting languages!). The declarations int i, char b were created in
C. Other types will appear later.
The += operator comes from Algol 68 (but was written =+)
In Bcpl, a block of statements was enclosed inside the (* and *) symbols as the comment in /* and */ and
sub-expressions inside ( and ). I suppose this symbolism was intended to denote that anything is an
expression in the language, and also to reduce the parsing time. The C language simplified the writting with
the { and } symbols, that does the original idea doesn't remains.
Union and cast come from Algol 68.
++ was already in the B language.
The keyword "include" comes from PL/I.
The preprocessor was implemented in 1973, and C has been used from this date to write Unix, but Ritchie
worked on it since 1969. The language has evolved until 1980. .
Prolog - 1970+
A. Colmerauer, D. Roussel
Has been developped both in France at Aix-en-Provence and at Edimburg.
Has introduced LOGIC PROGRAMMING. A program is made of Horn clauses.
Prolog is declarative, its system of logic inference is an engine of resolution.
Sql - 1970+ - Standard Query Language
IBM
Language of query for relational databases. Successor of the Square language.
Awk - 1974 - First letters of authors' names
Aho, Kerninghan, Weinberger
Word processing language based on regular expressions, using a pattern-action principle.
Scheme - 1975 - From "schemmer"
Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy L. Steele at MIT
Language derived from Lisp but simplified. The types are boolean, integer of indefinite size, rational and
complex, characters, symbols, vectors, oriented pairs, lists, associative lists, hash tables. The S-expression
generic type is used to extend the language.
It is often used as a scripting language, by the Gimp for example. Standard.
The language and development tool Hop from Inria is Scheme extended into a functional HTML dialect to
build Web 2.0 application.
Plasma - 1975
Carl Hewitt
Language of actors. Implemented in Lisp.
Sasl - 1976 - Saint Andrews Static Language
D. Turner
Aimed to teach the functional programming.
Comes from Iswim, unlimited data structures.
Icon - 1977
Griswold
Procedural language, with word processing function as Snobol4, and powerful constructs.
It has structured types: list, set, table (dictionary).
A list is declared: name := [ "word", "word", number, etc...]
A list may be indexed in the form a[i] or be used as a stack.
A "set" hold elements without doubloons, and has several functions: union, intersection, removing.
The RANGE construct is written: a to b where "to" is a keyword and "a" and "b" are variables..
A range may used inside an expression or as argument of a function. The expression or the function are
called with each value in the range.
Ex: write(1 to 5) will display 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5.
Expression don't return a boolean value, but are either evaluated or rejected. The operation are executed if
the expression may be evaluated. This is the first language where expression evaluating it leaded by the
GOAL.
There is a statement of the C language: if ( x= expression) ... which means: assign to x the result of the
expression, and if a is non zero, then..., this construct is generalized in Icon, if the expression may be
evaluated, x gets the value, else x remains unchanged and the condition is ignored.
The EVERY..DO construct associated to an expression works as an iterator. As the range.
The ALTERNATION is another powerful construct. It allows to use a sequence of parameters until a result
is obtained. The symbol is "|".
For example the statement : if a | b | c = 0 | 1 means for.... if a or b or c is 0 or 1 then ...
ML - 1973? - Meta Language
R. Milner
garbage collector.
An open source version exist, Sather, (from the name of a tower at Berkeley).
GAP - 1986 - Groups, Algorithms and Programming
Johannes Meier, Werner Nickel, Alice Niemeyer, Martin Schönert and others
The language has been defined to program mathematical algorithms.
It is interpreted, interactive an untyped. List and records are complex variables.
The syntax is that of Pascal with some differences. Comments for exemple are introduced by #.
An end of bloc is denoted by inverted keywords: if fi, do od.
The for loop has the forms: for in list, for in from to.
The language has procedures and functions.
What made it apart if that variables point out values and not memory addresses, and the form of a definition
of function is as a call: x := function(arguments) body.
A function may be embedded inside another function.
Miranda - 1989 - From the name of a Shakespeare's heroin (Miranda, means for admirable in latin)
D.Turner
Inspired by Sasl and ML. Lazy evaluation: arguments of functions are evaluated only when they are used.
Embedded pattern-matching, modules.
Caml - 1987 - Categorical Abstract Machine Language
Suarez, Weiss, Maury
Caml and Objective caml in 1996, has implemented ML.
Perl - 1987 - Practical Extracting and Report Langage
Larry Wall
Destinated to replace the command line language of Unix, Sh, Sed and Awk, it kept the same ugly syntax.
Used mainly for system administration, CGI scripts.
Includes lists and associatives arrays. The FOREACH control structure allows to scan lists.
Oberon - 1988
Niklaus Wirth
Successor of Modula 2 (and Pascal).
Several commonly used constructs are suppressed to reduce the risk or error! A garbage collector is added
to.
Haskell - 1990 - Nickname of a logician, Haskell Curry
Purely functional language. Inspired by Miranda and Sasl.
Functional arrays, pattern matching.
ABC 1980-90 - ABC (equivalent to EZ in english)
CWI - Meertens, Pemberton and Guido Van Rossum
Scripting language elaborated at CWI in Netherlands, and the goal of which was to become a successor to
Quick Basic or scripting languages of Unix.
Perhaps the first to use INDENTING to denote statements of a block: no markers as begin/end.
Another innovation, there is no file management, but rather persistency of the global variables: the value is
stored from a session to another!
There are five types: number, string, list, composed (structure without fieldnames), array.
Python - 1991 - From the english TV movie "Monty Python Flying Circus"
Guido Van Rossum
Scripting language with dynamic types. This is a replacement to Perl.
Inspired by ABC, but is extensible with C libraries, and object oriented.
As ABC, used evolved types: tuple, list, dictionary.
The slicing operator [a : b] allows to extract a sub-list from a list.
There is a version that compiles in Java bytecode, jython and ports for .NET.
Pov-Ray - 1991 - Persistence Of Vision (title of a mediocre science-fiction book).
D. & A. Collins, and contributors
Pov-Ray is a language for describing 3D images.
DisCo - 1992 - Distributed Co-operation
Reino Kurki-Suonio
Disco is a specification language for reactive systems with Pascal-like syntax. Constructs of the language are
objects, event-driven functions (named here actions), and relations. A function is activated when a state of
the system occurs and may be overwritten, this is named "refinement" in the language. Disco focuses on
collective behavior. Layers are modules of the language. It is an system oriented language with objects and
behavior (not action oriented as it is said in the presentation).
Ruby - 1994 - As the jewel, analogy with Perl
Yukihiro Matsumoto
Ruby has been designed as successor to Perl and alternative to Python, to be clearer than the first one, and
more object oriented than the second one. The syntax comes from these two languages, it want to be without
surprise and natural but may be complex.
There is no new control structure as in Scriptol, but a lot of minor innovations to make the code smaller.
It is an interpreted language easy to extend. Statements are terminated by end of line. Blocks of statement
and loop are delimited by "end". Most Python's features are present: associative arrays, iterators...
The originality is the dynamic object feature (adding methods to instances) and scope of variables denoted
by a prefix.
Java - 1994 - Java (coffee)
James Gosling and other programmers at Sun
Conceived at the beginning, in 1991, as an interactive language named Oak, was unsuccessful. But in 1994
has been rewritten for Internet and renamed Java. In 1995 navigators can run applets. In january 1996,
Javasoft distributes JDK 1.0, the Java Developpement Kit.
Java is a classical procedural language, near C++. It compiles in bytecode, interpreted on any computer. ..
It is simpler than C++: one class by file, automatic memory management, no pointers. No multiple
inheritance nor operator overloading, but integrated multi-tasking.
Unlike C and C++, has only dynamic arrays.
PHP - 1995 - Personal Home Pages Hypertext Processor
Rasmus Lerdorf
Multi-platforms scripting language, embedded inside HTML.
Near C but not typed. Variables are prefixed by the $ symbol as the shell of Unix or as Perl. The interpreter
parses a html page that embeds php code and delivers a pure html page.
An extended library of functions allows webmasters to build dynamic pages.
Microsoft uses an equivalent language under Windows, ASP, near Basic.
JavaScript - 1995 (Has been firstly named LiveScript)
Brendan Eich at Netscape
Scripting language to embedd procedural code into web pages.
May be used to other applications, XML based languages for example.
Share the syntax of C or Java, but with untyped variables. The element of the web page (window, table,
etc...) are accessed through the Document Object Model.
UML - 1996 - Unified Modeling Language
Standard by OMG (Object Management Group) - Grady Booch, Jim Rumbaugh, and Ivar Jacobson
UML is the union of three modeling languages designed by the three authors above. The language uses a
graphical notation to design software projects. A source is a diagram expressing objects and their
interactions. A model is made of views and the combination of them describes a complete system. The
model is abstract and domain-independent.
ECMAScript - 1997
Standard by the european standardization organisation E.C.M.A.
Standard to the langage invented by Netscape, to let dynamic HTML pages client-side.
Rebol - 1997 (The design is older) - Relative Expression Based Object Language
Carl SassenRath
Interpreted, extensible scripting language that produces compact code. It is aimed at communication on
Internet and distributed computing.
Has 45 types using same operators (Ex: date, money...). Use [ ] to enclose blocks of statements.
C# - 2000 - (C-sharp), want to succeed to C++
Anders Hejlsberg / Microsoft
This is the main language of the .NET environment, to program software working thought Internet. As Java,
it keeps the C syntax, a 34 years old language, with same improvments: garbage collector, no pointer,
interfaces, multi-tasking...
C# compiles to intermediate language, the MSIL (MicroSoft Intermediate Language), and uses a multi-
languages library, the CLR (Common Language Runtime). The originality of the .NET system is that
ECMA
E4X is not a language but an addition to a language. In the same manner Scriptol uses XML as data
structure with attributes and methods, E4X allows to assign XML to ECMAScript variables, and to access
elements by indices or attributes.
JavaFX Script - 2005-2007
This language which is built on Java, incorporates and expands its syntax. It is intended to create rich
graphical interface for the Web. It is used with NetBeans.
The langage was designed en 2005 and named F3 (Form Follows Function), but after the company has been
bought by Sun, it was renamed JavaFX Script and open sourced.
The future
Some trends:
Scripting languages
Several modern scripting languages offer a simple, natural syntax: NetRexx, Python, Ruby, Scriptol. Python
is the most widely used for now. Ruby is mainly used for the Rail library. Scriptol has innovative features.
Internet languages
These languages allows to embed code inside HTML page and thus to combine statements and data. PHP,
ASP, JavaScript are the most used ones. The .NET platform will allow any language to be embedded into
HTML.
Markup languages
A recent trend is to turn XML documents into executables.
- XML is embedded into Scriptol sources as a data structure, that is usable by any statement in the source.
This is a next step beyond object oriented programming.
- XUL is a Mozilla project that embeds JavaScript into XML to easily produce GUI (the one of Mozilla for
example). On the Web with Firefox or locally with the XULRunner runtime.
- Microsoft uses XAML to define graphical interfaces, on the Web with the cross-browsers plug-in
Silverlight or locally on .NET.
A new C++ language
C++0x, will be probably C++09. This new version will include as standard a lot of external libraries. It will
have tuples and garbage collector and an extended standard library with regular expression and threads.
SQL
Thanks to Web applications and dynamic sites of the Web 2.0, SQL trends to be more and more popular,
and so is now a part of modern programming.