Lesson 1 – The Evolution

of Programming Language
Mr. Kevin Christian S. Tupas
The Evolution of Programming Languages
What is a programming language

• Programming Language is indeed the fundamental unit of today’s

tech world. It is considered as the set of commands and
instructions that we give to the machines to perform a particular
task.
• In the computer world, we have about 500+ programming
languages with having their own syntax and features. And if you
type who’s the father of the computer, then the search engine will
show you the result as to Charles Babbage but the father of the
computer didn’t write the first code. It was Ada Lovelace who has
written the first-ever computer programming language and the
year was 1883.
1883: The Journey starts from here…!!

• In the early days, Charles Babbage had

made the device, but he was confused
about how to give instructions to the
machine, and then Ada Lovelace wrote
the instructions for the analytical
engine.
• The device was made by Charles
Babbage and the code was written by
Ada Lovelace for computing
Bernoulli’s number.
• First time in history that the capability
of computer devices was judged.
1949: Assembly Language

• It is a type of low-level language.

• It mainly consists of instructions (kind of symbols) that only machines could
understand.
• In today’s time also assembly language is used in real-time programs such as
simulation flight navigation systems and medical equipment e.g. – Fly-by-wire
(FBW) systems.
• It is also used to create computer viruses.
• Developed by Alick Glennie.
• The first compiled computer programming language.
• COBOL and FORTRAN are the languages referred to as Autocode.
1957: FORTRAN

• Developers are John Backus

and IBM.
• It was designed for numeric
computation and scientific
computing.
• Software for NASA probes
voyager-1 (space probe) and
voyager-2 (space probe) was
originally written in FORTRAN
5.
1958: ALGOL

• ALGOL stands for ALGOrithmic Language.

• The initial phase of the most popular programming languages of C,
C++, and JAVA.
• It was also the first language implementing the nested function
and has a simple syntax than FORTRAN.
• The first programming language to have a code block like “begin”
that indicates that your program has started and “end” means you
have ended your code.
1959: COBOL

• It stands for COmmon Business-Oriented Language.

• In 1997, 80% of the world’s business ran on Cobol.
• The US internal revenue service scrambled its path to COBOL-
based IMF (individual master file) in order to pay the tens of
millions of payments mandated by the coronavirus aid, relief, and
economic security.
1964: BASIC

• It stands for beginners’ All-

purpose symbolic instruction
code.
• In 1991 Microsoft released Visual
Basic, an updated version of Basic
• The first microcomputer version
of Basic was co-written by Bill
Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte
Davidoff for their newly-formed
company, Microsoft.
1972: C

• It is a general-purpose, procedural programming language and the most

popular programming language till now.
• All the code that was previously written in assembly language gets
replaced by the C language like operating system, kernel, and many
other applications.
• It can be used in implementing an operating system, embedded system,
and also on the website using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI).
• C is the mother of almost all higher-level programming languages like
C#, D, Go, Java, JavaScript, Limbo, LPC, Perl, PHP, Python, and Unix’s
C shell.
Generations of programming language
• Programming languages have been developed over the year in a
phased manner. Each phase of developed has made the
programming language more user-friendly, easier to use and more
powerful. Each phase of improved made in the development of the
programming languages can be referred to as a generation. The
programming language in terms of their performance reliability
and robustness can be grouped into five different generations,
First Generation Language (Machine
language)
First Generation Language (Machine
language)

• The first-generation programming language is also called low-level

programming language because they were used to program the
computer system at a very low level of abstraction. i.e., at the
machine level. The machine language also referred to as the
native language of the computer system is the first-generation
programming language. In the machine language, a programmer
only deals with a binary number.
First Generation
Language (Machine
language)
Advantages of first-generation language

• They are translation free and can be directly executed by the

computers.
• The programs written in these languages are executed very
speedily and efficiently by the CPU of the computer system.
• The programs written in these languages utilize the memory in an
efficient manner because it is possible to keep track of each bit of
data.
Second Generation language (Assembly
Language)
Second Generation language (Assembly
Language)

• The second-generation programming language also belongs to the

category of low-level- programming language. The second-
generation language comprises assembly languages that use the
concept of mnemonics for the writing program. In the assembly
language, symbolic names are used to represent the opcode and
the operand part of the instruction.
Second Generation
language (Assembly
Language)
Advantages of second-generation language

• It is easy to develop understand and modify the program

developed in these languages are compared to those developed in
the first-generation programming language.
• The programs written in these languages are less prone to errors
and therefore can be maintained with a great case.
Third Generation languages (High-Level
Languages)
Third Generation languages (High-Level
Languages)

• The third-generation programming languages were designed to

overcome the various limitations of the first- and second-
generation programming languages. The languages of the third and
later generation are considered as a high-level language because
they enable the programmer to concentrate only on the logic of
the programs without considering the internal architecture of the
computer system.
Third Generation languages (High-Level
Languages)
Advantages of third generation programming
language

• It is easy to develop, learn and understand the program.

• As the program written in these languages are less prone to errors,
they are easy to maintain.
• The program written in these languages can be developed in very
less time as compared to the first- and second-generation
language.

Examples: FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, C++, C

Fourth generation language (Very High-level
Languages)
Fourth generation language (Very High-level
Languages)

• The languages of this generation were considered as very high-

level programming languages required a lot of time and effort that
affected the productivity of a programmer. The fourth-generation
programming languages were designed and developed to reduce
the time, cost and effort needed to develop different types of
software applications.
Fourth generation language (Very High-level
Languages)
• These programming languages allow the efficient use of data by
implementing the various database.
• They require less time, cost and effort to develop different types
of software applications.
• The program developed in these languages are highly portable as
compared to the programs developed in the languages of other
generation.

Examples: SOL, CSS, ColdFusion

Fifth generation language (Artificial
Intelligence Language)
Fifth generation language (Artificial
Intelligence Language)

• The programming languages of this generation mainly focus on

constraint programming. The major fields in which the fifth-
generation programming language are employed are Artificial
Intelligence and Artificial Neural Networks
• These languages can be used to query the database in a fast and
efficient manner.
• In this generation of language, the user can communicate with the
computer system in a simple and an easy manner.

Examples: mercury, prolog, OPS5