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Carlton's Notes on
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1. Definition of a Programming Language Definition A History of Programming Languages 1940 – Ada Byron King described in great detail
Charles Babbage's mechanical general purpose computational device which he
called the analytical engine. Despite the fact that Babbage never built a
working model of his analytical engine, Ada Lovelace specified in complete
detail a method for computing Bernoulli numbers with that machine. This is
generally considered to be the world's first computer program. 1949 - Short Code was the first computer language
that actually was used on an electronic computing device. It is, however, a
"hand-compiled" language. 1951 - MATH-MATIC was developed by Grace Hopper
while working for Remington Rand, MATH-MATIC was the first widely known
compiler. It was code named A-0 prior to its release by Rand in 1957. As a
side note, in 1983 I ran into Grace Hopper in the Atlanta airport and talked to
her for a few minutes. She handed me a piece of wire cut to a length in which
electricity travels in a nano-second. 1952 - AUTOCODE was developed by Alick E. Glennie in
his spare time at the University of Manchester. He called it a “rudimentary
compiler”. 1957 - FORTRAN is an abbreviateion of FORmula
TRANslating system. It was developed by a team headed by John Backus. John
goes on to assist in the development of ALGOL and BNF. 1958 - FORTRAN II was developed by John McCarthy
while working at M.I.T. The system is able to handle subroutines and links to
assembly language. John also worked on developing LISP which is derived from LISt
Processing. 1959 - LISP 1.5 was developed by John McCarthy while
working at M.I.T. 1959 - COBOL is created by the Conference on Data
Systems and Languages (CODASYL). 1960 - ALGOL 60 first appears. This language lays
the foundation that ultimately produces Pascal. ALGOL becomes the most popular
language in Europe at the time. 1960s – APL is derived from A Programming
Language. It was developed by Kenneth Iverson and it uses a specialized
character set that works with APL-compatible I/O devices. Iverson documents his
work in his 12962 book, A Programming Language . 1962 - FORTRAN IV is released. 1971 – SNOBOL is derived from StriNg-Oriented symBOlic Language. 1971 – SPITBOL is derived from SPeedy
ImplemenTation of snoBOL. 1963 - ALGOL 60 is revised. 1963 - PL/1 development begins. 1963 – Sketchpad was designed on the TX-2 computer
at MIT. This language is considered to be the first computer graphics
application. 1964 - APL\360 is implemented. 1964 - BASIC is developed by professors John G.
Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz while working at Dartmouth University. The first
BASIC program is said to have run at 4:00 a.m. on May 1, 1964. 1964 - PL/1 is released. 1965 - SNOBOL3 is released. 1966 - FORTRAN 66 appears. 1966 - LISP 2 is released. 1966 - LOGO development is started by by Wally
Fuerzeig and Seymour Papert at Bolt, Beranek, & Newman. LOGO becomes best
known for "turtle graphics." 1967 - SNOBOL4 is released. 1968 - ALGOL 68 is released. ALGOL 68 develops a
reputation for being difficult to implement and members of the specifications
committee protest its approval. 1968 - ALTRAN is released as a variant of FORTRAN. 1968 - COBOL is officially defined by ANSI. 1968 - Pascal development is begun by Niklaus Wirth. 1970 – Forth is developed by Charles Moore, and he
writes his first significant program using this language. 1970 - Prolog development begins. 1970 - Smalltalk development begins by Alan Kay
while working at Xerox PARC. This effort spawned Smalltalk-72, Smalltalk-74, and
Smalltalk-76. 1970 - Pascal first appears on a CDC 6000-series
computer. 1970 - Icon is released. This language is a
descendant of SNOBOL4. 1972 - C is
developed by Denni S. Ritchie. The reference manual is released in 1974. 1972 - Prolog is developed and released by Alain
Colmerauer and Phillip Roussel. 1975 - Tiny BASIC is developed by Bob Albrecht and
Dennis Allison (the language is implementation by Dick Whipple and John Arnold).
The language first runs on a 4-KB microcomputer, using just 2 KB of the RAM for
the program. 1975 – A version of BASIC is developed by Bill
Gates and Paul Allen, which they sell to MITS (Micro Instrumentation and
Telemetry Systems) for use on its’ Altair, an 8080-based microcomputer. 1975 - Scheme is developed by G.L. Steele and G.J.
Sussman. It is a descendant of , a LISP. 1975 - The Pascal User Manual and Report is
published by Jensen and Wirth. 1975 – RATFOR is an abbreviation of RATional
FORTRAN. It is developed by B.W. Kerninghan and it allows C-like control
structures in FORTRAN. 1976 - Design System Language is released. It is
considered to be a predecessor to PostScript. 1977 - MUMPS is an abbreviation of Massachusetts
General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System.It first appears in 1977
and was originally used to handle medical records. MUMPS only recognizes string
data-type. It was later renamed M. 1977 – ADA -The design competition that will
produce Ada begins. Honeywell Bull's team, led by Jean Ichbiah, will win the
competition. 1977 – FIG is an abbreviation of the FORTH
interest group. Developed by Kim Harris and others FIG-FORTH sold for around
$20. 1970s - UCSD Pascal was developed by Kenneth Bowles
and made Pascal available on PDP-11 and Z80-based computers. 1977 - Modula-2 is the successor to Pascal.
Development is initiated by Niklaus Wirth. 1978 - AWK is released. It is a text-processing
language named after the designers, Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan. 1978 -
VISICALC is released by Dan Bricklin of Frankston. Technically it is a
programming language, however we generally refer t it as a spreadsheet
application. 1978 - FORTRAN 77 - The ANSI standard for FORTRAN 77
is released. 1979 -
Green is released by Jean Ichbiah et al.,
while working for the US Department of Defense. 1980 - Smalltalk-80 is released. 1980 - Modula-2 is released. 1980 – C is developed by Bjarne Stroustrup. This
language later spawns C++. 1981 - Common LISP development begins. This is to be
a common dialect of LISP. 1981 - Prolog is developed by Japan under the Fifth
Generation Computer System project. 1982 - ISO Pascal is released. 1982 – PostScript is released. 1983 - Smalltalk-80 is published by Goldberg et al. 1983 - Ada is released. Its name is derived from Lady
Augusta Ada Byron. She is the Countess of Lovelace and daughter of the
English poet Byron. She has been referred to as the first computer programmer
because of her work on Charles Babbage's analytical engine. In 1983, the
Department of Defense dictated that all new "mission-critical"
applications be written in Ada. 1983/1984 - C Compilers for microcomputers are first
released by both Microsoft and Digital Research. 1983 - C++ is released. The product is named by Rick
Mascitti. 1983 - Turbo Pascal is released by Borland with a
splash, thanks to an effective advertisement in BYTE magazine. 1984 - APL2 is descendant of APL that permits nested
arrays. A reference manual for APL2 is released. 1984 - Vanilla SNOBOL4 for microcomputers is
released. 1984 – Methods is released. It is a line-oriented
Smalltalk for PCs. 1984 -
CLIPPER is released by Nantucket. 1985 – PARADOX is released by Borland. 1986 - Smalltalk/V is released for microcomputers. 1986 - Object Pascal for the Mac is released by
Apple. 1986 - Turbo Prolog is released by Borland. 1986 - Actor is released by Charles Duff. It is an
object-oriented language for developing Microsoft Windows applications. 1986 – Eiffel is released. It is an
object-oriented language. 1986 - C++ appears. 1987 - Turbo Pascal version 4.0 is released. 1987 – Perl is released. 1988 - CLOS is derived from Common LISP Object
System. The specifications for this language are published. 1988 - Oberon is released by Niklaus Wirth. This
language is a descendent of Modula-2. 1989 - The ANSI C specification is published. 1989 - C++ 2.0 draft reference manual is released.
The 2.0 version adds multiple inheritance and pointers to members. 1990 - C++
2.1 Reference Manual by B. Stroustrup et al, is published. This version adds
templates and exception-handling features. 1990 - FORTRAN 90 is released it includes case
statements and derived types. 1990 - J is presented at the APL90 conference by
Kenneth Iverson and Roger Hui. 1991 - Visual Basic wins BYTE's Best of Show award
at Spring COMDEX. Visual Basic (VB) is a descendant of the BASIC programming
language developed by Microsoft. It is an event driven programming language
centered around a forms engine that enables rapid development of graphical user
interface applications and a database object library (ADO). It is used primarily
for database front ends, and its relative VBScript is the language for Active
Server Pages. 1991 – Python is released. 1992 – Dylan, which is derived from Dylan
Thomas, is released by Apple. It is an object-oriented language that
resembles Scheme. 1993 – The X3J4.1 technical report is released by
ANSI. It is the first-draft proposal for object-oriented COBOL. 1994 – VBA - Microsoft incorporates Visual Basic
for Applications into Excel. 1995 - Ada 95 is accepted by ISO. It includes OOP
features and support for real-time systems. 1995 - Java is created by James Gosling and other
engineers at Sun Microsystems. It was officially announced on May 23, 1995, at
SunWorld. It is language is an
object-oriented programming language developed so that programs written for it
will look and function approximately the same regardless of the device it is
running on. 1996 - C++ standard is released by ANSI. 1997 - Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is built
into every product in the Microsoft Office family (Word, Excel, Access etc.),
and also in several third-part products such as Visio. This makes Visual Basic
the programming platform with the largest installed base in the world. VBA is
developed to write small applications for specific purposes. IN recent years,
VBA has been exploited to write macro viruses which are able to spread. 1997 – ActiveX is released by Microsoft. 2001 – KYLIX is released by Borland. It is a
descendant of Delphi5. References
The above history was developed in part from the following resources:
Programming Language Family TreeBased on what I have read, I have attempted to reconstruct
a Programming Language Family Tree, which depicts the natural progression of
programming languages from their ancestors through their descendents. It is a
difficult exercise and I am sure that I have made many errors here. Still, this
might be useful to you.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
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