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Historical
Progression of Computer Science

Charles Babbage Alan Turing Grace Hopper Settings

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A TIMELINE
for the History of Programming Languages

 1840s 

Basile Bouchon developed the control of a loom by punched holes in paper tape in 1725. The design was improved by his assistant Jean-Baptiste Falcon and by Jacques Vaucanson. Although these improvements controlled the patterns woven, they still required an assistant to operate the mechanism.

In 1804 Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated a mechanism to automate loom operation. A number of punched cards were linked into a chain of any length. Each card held the instructions for shedding (raising and lowering the warp) and selecting the shuttle for a single pass.

Semyon Korsakov was reputedly the first to propose punched cards in informatics for information store and search. Korsakov announced his new method and machines in September 1832. Charles Babbage proposed the use of "Number Cards", "pierced with certain holes and standing opposite levers connected with a set of figure wheels ... advanced they push in those levers opposite to which there are no holes on the cards and thus transfer that number together with its sign" in his description of the Calculating Engine's Store. There is no evidence that he built a practical example.

During 1842 ~ 1849, Ada Lovelace translated the memoir of Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea about Charles Babbage's newest proposed machine: the Analytical Engine; she supplemented the memoir with notes that specified in detail a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the engine, recognized by most historians as the world's first published computer program.

Jacquard Looms's Difference Engine both were designed to utilize punched cards, which would describe the sequence of operations that their programmable machines should perform.

The first computer codes were specialized for their applications: for example, Alonzo Church was able to express the lambda calculus progrssion in a formulaic way and the Turing machine was an abstraction of the operation of a tape-marking machine.

In 1881 Jules Carpentier developed a method of recording and playing back performances on a harmonium using punched cards. The system was called the Mélographe Répétiteur and "writes down ordinary music played on the keyboard dans le langage de Jacquard", that is as holes punched in a series of cards. By 1887 Carpentier had separated the mechanism into the Melograph which recorded the player's key presses and the Melotrope which played the music.

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 1940s 

In the late 1940s, Alick Glennie developed Autocode, possibly the first compiled programming language, at the University of Manchester. In 1949, a second iteration of the language, known as the "Mark 1 Autocode," was developed for the Mark 1 by R. A. Brooker. Brooker, with the University of Manchester, also developed an autocode for the Ferranti Mercury in the 1950s.

The version for the EDSAC 2 was devised by Douglas Hartree of University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in 1961. Known as EDSAC 2 Autocode, it was a straight development from Mercury Autocode adapted for local circumstances and was noted for its object code optimization and source-language diagnostics which were advanced for the time.

A contemporary but separate thread of development, Atlas Autocode was developed for the University of Manchester Atlas 1 machine. AA was a block structured language that featured explicitly typed variables, subroutines, and functions. It omitted some ALGOL features such as passing parameters by name, which in ALGOL 60 means passing the memory address of a short subroutine (a thunk) to recalculate a parameter each time it is mentioned.

In the 1940s, the first recognizably modern electrically powered computers were created. The limited speed and memory capacity forced programmers to write hand-tuned assembly language programs. It was eventually realized that programming in assembly language required a great deal of intellectual effort.

An early proposal for a high-level programming language was Plankalkül, developed by Konrad Zuse for his Z1 computer between 1942 and 1945 but not implemented at the time.

The first functioning programming languages designed to communicate instructions to a computer were written in the early 1950s. John Mauchly's Short Code, proposed in 1949, was one of the first high-level languages ever developed for an electronic computer. Unlike machine code, Short Code statements represented mathematical expressions in understandable form.

However, the program had to be interpreted into machine code every time it ran, making the process much slower than running the equivalent machine code.

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 1950s 

The FLOW-MATIC compiler became publicly available in early 1958 and was substantially complete in 1959. Flow-Matic was a major influence in the design of COBOL, since only it and its direct descendant AIMACO were in use at the time.

Other languages still in use today include LISP (1958), invented by John McCarthy and COBOL (1959), created by the Short Range Committee. Another milestone in the late 1950s was the publication, by a committee of American and European computer scientists, of "a new language for algorithms"; the ALGOL 60 Report (the "ALGOrithmic Language").

This report consolidated many ideas circulating at the time and featured three key language innovations: nested block structure: code sequences and associated declarations could be grouped into blocks without having to be turned into separate, explicitly named procedures; lexical scoping: a block could have its own private variables, procedures and functions, invisible to code outside that block, that is, information hiding. Another innovation, related to this, was in how the language was described: a mathematically exact notation, Backus~Naur form (BNF), was used to describe the language's syntax. Nearly all subsequent programming languages have used a variant of BNF to describe the context-free portion of their syntax.

In 1954, FORTRAN was invented at IBM by a team led by John Backus; it was the first widely used high-level general purpose language to have a functional implementation, in contrast to only a design on paper. When FORTRAN was first introduced, it was viewed with skepticism due to bugs, and the comparative efficiency of "hand-coded" programs written in assembly.

However, the language eventually became known for its efficiency. It is still a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's TOP500 fastest supercomputers.

Another early programming language was devised by Grace Hopper in the US, named FLOW-MATIC. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand during the period from 1955 until 1959. Hopper found that business data processing customers were uncomfortable with mathematical notation, and in early 1955, she and her team wrote a specification for an English language programming language and implemented a prototype.

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 1970s 

The 1960s and 1970s also saw considerable debate over the merits of "structured programming", which meant programming without the use of goto. A significant fraction of programmers believed that, even in languages that provide goto, it is bad programming style to use it except in rare circumstances. This debate was closely related to language design: some languages had no goto, which forced the use of structured programming.

To provide even faster compile times, some languages were structured for "one-pass compilers" which expect subordinate routines to be defined first, as with Pascal, where the main routine is the final section of the program listing.

Some notable languages that were developed in this period include: 1967 BCPL (forerunner to B); 1968 Logo; 1969 B (forerunner to C); 1970 Pascal; 1970 Forth; 1972 C; 1972 Smalltalk; 1972 Prolog; 1973 ML; 1975 Scheme; 1978 SQL (a query language, later extended).

The period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s brought a major flowering of programming languages. Most of the major language paradigms now in use were invented in this period:

FORTH, the earliest concatenative programming language was designed by Charles Moore in 1969 as a personal development system while at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

C, an early systems programming language, was developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs between 1969 and 1973. Smalltalk (mid-1970s) provided a complete ground-up design of an object-oriented language.

Prolog, designed in 1972 by Alain Colmerauer, Phillipe Roussel, and Robert Kowalski, was the first logic programming language. ML built a polymorphic type system (invented by Robin Milner in 1973) on Lisp, pioneering statically typed functional programming languages. Each of these languages spawned an entire family of descendants, and most modern languages count at least one of them in their ancestry.

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 1980s 

Although major new paradigms for imperative programming languages did not appear, many researchers expanded on the ideas of prior languages and adapted them. E.g., the languages of the Argus and Emerald systems adapted object-oriented programming to distributed computing systems.

The 1980s also brought advances in programming language implementation. The reduced instruction set computer (RISC) movement in computer architecture postulated that hardware should be designed for compilers rather than for human assembly programmers.

Aided by central processing unit (CPU) speed improvements that enabled increasingly aggressive compiling methods, the RISC movement sparked greater interest in compiler technology for high-level languages. Language technology continued along these lines well into the 1990s.

Reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer architecture designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set computer (CISC), a RISC computer might require more instructions (more code) in order to accomplish a task because the individual instructions are written in simpler code.

The 1980s were years of relative consolidation in imperative languages. Rather than inventing new paradigms, all of them elaborated upon the ideas invented in previous decades. C++ combined object-oriented and systems programming. The United States government standardized Ada, a systems programming language intended for use by defense contractors.

In Japan and elsewhere, vast sums were spent investigating so-called fifth-generation programming languages that incorporated logic programming constructs. The functional languages community moved to standardize ML and Lisp. Research in Miranda began to take hold in this decade.

One important new trend in language design was an increased focus on programming for large-scale systems through the use of modules, or large-scale organizational units of code. Modula, Ada, and ML all developed notable module systems in the 1980s. Module systems were often wedded to generic programming constructs: generics being, in essence, parametrized modules (see also polymorphism in object-oriented programming).

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 1990s 

More radical and innovative than the RAD languages were the new scripting languages. These did not directly descend from other languages and featured new syntaxes and more liberal incorporation of features. Many consider these scripting languages to be more productive than even the RAD languages, but often because of choices that make small programs simpler but large programs more difficult to write and maintain.

Nevertheless, scripting languages came to be the most prominent ones used in connection with the Web. Some programming languages included other languages in their distribution to save the development time. for example both of Python and Ruby included Tcl to support GUI programming through libraries like Tkinter.

All such languages were object-oriented. These included Object Pascal, Objective Caml (renamed OCaml), Visual Basic, and Java. Java in particular received much attention. A big driving philosophy was programmer productivity. Many rapid application development (RAD) languages emerged, which usually came with an integrated development environment (IDE), garbage collection, and were descendants of older languages.

The rapid growth of the Internet in the mid-1990s was the next major historic event in programming languages. By opening up a radically new platform for computer systems, the Internet created an opportunity for new languages to be adopted.

In particular, the JavaScript programming language rose to popularity because of its early integration with the Netscape Navigator web browser. Various other scripting languages achieved widespread use in developing customized applications for web servers such as PHP.

The 1990s saw no fundamental novelty in imperative languages, but much recombination and maturation of old ideas. This era began the spread of functional languages. A big driving philosophy was programmer productivity. Many rapid application development (RAD) languages emerged, which usually came with an integrated development environment (IDE), garbage collection, and were descendants of older languages. All such languages were object-oriented. These included Object Pascal, Objective Caml (renamed OCaml), Visual Basic, and Java. Java in particular received much attention.

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 2000s 

Integration with databases, including XML and relational databases. Early research in applying artificial intelligence (AI) methods to generate code using AI like using GPT-3 and Gemini. Early research into quantum computing programming languages

Open source as a developmental philosophy for languages, including the GNU Compiler Collection and languages such as PHP, Python, Ruby, and Scala. More interest in visual programming languages like Scratch, LabVIEW, and PWCT Massively parallel languages for GPU graphics processing units and supercomputer arrays, including OpenCL.

Many Big Tech companies introduced multiple new programming languages that are designed to serve their needs and provides first-class support for their platforms. for example: Microsoft introduced C#, F#, TypeScript, Q#, Bosque and Power Fx. Google introduced Go, Dart and Carbon. Apple introduced Swift. Meta introduced Hack.

Increasing support for functional programming in mainstream languages used commercially, including purely functional programming for making code easier to reason about and to parallelize (at both micro- and macro- levels). Constructs to support concurrent and distributed programming. Mechanisms for adding security and reliability verification to the language: extended static checking, dependent typing, information flow control, static thread safety.

Programming language evolution continues, in both industry and research. Some of the recent trends have included: Increasing support for functional programming in mainstream languages used commercially, including purely functional programming for making code easier to reason about and to parallelize (at both micro- and macro- levels).

Constructs to support concurrent and distributed programming. Mechanisms for adding security and reliability verification to the language: extended static checking, dependent typing, information flow control, static thread safety.

Alternative mechanisms for composability and modularity: mixins, traits, typeclasses, delegates, aspects. Component-oriented software development. Metaprogramming, reflection or access to the abstract syntax tree

AOP or Aspect Oriented Programming allowing developers to insert code in another module or class at "join points". Domain-specific languages and code generation. XML for graphical interface (XUL, Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML)). Increased interest in distribution and mobility.

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