Module 1.1.1: Evolution of Programming Languages

prelim topic

FORTRAN (Formula Translation)

• Created by John Backus at IBM in 1957

• It was the first high-level language. It revolutionized computing by allowing complex mathematical formulas to be written in human-readable code and remains a standard in scientific and supercomputing today.

COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language)

• Developed by Grace Hopper in 1959

• It was designed for business, finance, and administrative system.

• Famous for its English-like syntax and still runs the majority of global financial and banking back-ends

LISP (List Processing)

• Created by John McCarthy in 1958.

• It introduced functional programming, tree data structures, and recursion.

• linked lists are one of its major data structures, and its source code is itself made up of lists.

• It became the primary language for Artificial Intelligence research for decades

ALGOL (Algorithmic Language)

• Is a family of imperative languages developed in the 1950s. introduced by ACM and GAMM experts

• Greatly influenced many other programming languages, It introduced block structures (begin and end) and lexical scoping, serving as the blueprint for almost all modern “curly brace” languages like C and Java

PL/I (Programming Language One)

• Launched by IBM in 1964 to combine the scientific power of FORTRAN with the business capabilities of COBOL

• While complex and large, it remains relevant in mainframe environments

PASCAL

• Developed by Niklaus Wirth in 1970.

• It is a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.

• Known for its strong typing and clear syntax.

SIMULA

• Developed by Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl in the 1960s.

• It was the first language to introduce classes, objects, and inheritance, forming the conceptual foundation for OOP (Object-Oriented Programming)

• Considered the first OOP language

ISWIM (If You See What I Mean)

• Designed by Peter Landin in 1966.

• An influential conceptual language, it was never fully implemented as a product but defined the core principles of modern programming languages like Haskell and ML

C

• Created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in 1972 for the Unix OS.

• It provides low-level memory access with high-level syntax, making it the ‘lingua franca’ of systems programming, kernels, and embedded systems.

• One of the most popular and influential programming languages - widely used on many different software platforms.

SMALLTALK

• Developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s

• It is a purely object-oriented language where “everything is an object”

• It pioneered GUIs and the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern

ADA

• Commissioned by the US Department of Defense in 1980 for safety-critical systems

• Famous for its extreme reliability and strong typing, still used today in aviation, space exploration, and military hardware

C++

• Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1985

• Was made to be an extension of C to include Object-Oriented features.

• A multi-paradigm, statically typed, compiled, general-purpose language,

• A middle-level language, as it comprises of a combination of both high-level and low-level language features

• Dominant in game engines, browsers, and high-performance applications

JAVA

• Developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995

• specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible, where developers “write once, run anywhere” = once compiled, it can be executed on any platform

• Using the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), it became the standard for enterprise software, Android development, and web servers.