EVOLUTION OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
What is a programming language?
A programming language is a language used to write programs using algorithms. Programming languages are unambiguous,recursive,have a rich library, fast speed and memory management.
The first programming languages were machine dependent known as 1st generation language and assembly language which used mnemonic codes to represent machine language known as 2nd generation language. They are referred to as low-level languages. Third generation languages which were mostly machine independent and were more English-like, however, they had to be converted into machine code by a compiler. FORTRAN Early programming languages such as Formula Transtino (FORTRAN) developed in 1957 and Common business-oriented languages(COBOL) developed in 1959 is used to program ATM machines and NASA. As well as A Programming Language(APL) developed in 1962 which led to the development of spreadsheets. They relied heavily on "goto" instructions which These languages performed complex statistical computations and mathematical logistics. They were difficult to manipulate and debug the code is tedious, some even had very intricate keywords. Pascal In 1970 Niklaus Wirth developed the Pascal programming language named after seventeenth century French Mathematician Blaise Pascal. It is designed to teach students how to program in a systematical way. Pascal had new additional features such as built in data type, user defined data types and is easy to understand. Today Pascal is used to program popular video sharing website, Skype. C C Programming Language is developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972. It is a high-level programming language, written to program popular operating system software Unix and later Linux and Windows. It is a by-product of B, an earlier programming language. It is closer to English than Pascal and had all the features of Pascal along with additional ones. C++ an advancement of C programming language is later created in 1983. Perl Perl was created by Larry Wall in 1987 as a text processing language for operating systems. It is a high-level programming language used to make web design interface that C failed to do. It is easy to learn because it doesn't have syntax errors that come with indentation or new lines. It is used today by popular advertising website, Craigslist. Python Python was created by Guido Van Rossum in 1991 as a better way to do system administration that C programming language could not facilitate.It's in-built functions covers a wide variety of activities. It is used to power Google,Youtube and Yahoo. Java Java was created by James Gosling in 1995 for an interactive television project. It uses the fundamentals of C and C++ but is more English-like. It is currently the most used programming language and is used to program mobile technology such as the Android OS applications. |