Know the History of Computer Languages

Know the History of Computer Languages

Know the History of Computer Languages : Multi-thousand tips to make your life easier.

Today, we are overwhelmed with user-friendly applications, such that an easy click can provide whatever we wish for, all thanks to programming languages, which are the backbones of these user-friendly applications. Computer use became easier, faster, better, and more in demand, allowing almost everyone to become capable of using different applications without needing to use complicated PC languages. Even if you only know the basics of programming languages, you can enjoy their great fruits.

But as an added bit of knowledge, it is best to learn about computing history, especially the origin of 4GL languages, C++ languages, and other famous programming languages then and now.

Here we take a look at the timeline of computer languages in PC history. You'll surely learn a lot from this list. You might even discover more about computing history.

1800s. Herman Hollerith encoded census data in 1890 using punch cards. Hollerith's eureka moment was when he observed that train conductors could encode the ticket holder's appearance on the train ticket. Also, the first computer capable of reading codes was made for this purpose. People realized that not only decimal numbers could be used as codes. Other numbers and words could also represent logical codes.

But the real origin of the first computer language, or even what the first computer language is, can be really hard to identify. Meanwhile, the computer languages during this era were more hardware dependent, making it very hard to evolve a new language without undergoing the tedious task of creating capable hardware.

1940s. The first recognized modern computer was created during this era. However, the speed and memory of the computer were so limited that it required operation by only highly intellectual programmers. Worse, the programs were prone to errors. Still, the development of computer languages continued with the creation of Plankalkul, ENIAC, and C-10.

1950s. More modern programming languages were created. There were Fortran (1954), Cobol (1959), and LISP (1958), which are all widely used these days. Other programming languages developed during this age were the Regional Assembly Language, Autocode, FLOW-MATIC, COMTRAN, ALGOL 58, and FACT.

1960s to 1970s. Many important programming languages were created during this period. Some of these are APL, Simula, BASIC, PL/I, Pascal, Forth, C, SmallTalk, Prolog, ML, and SQL. Simula was invented in the 1960s by Dahl and Nygaard. This was made as a superset of Algol 60, which is the first programming language supporting object-oriented programming.

The most important debate during this era was the use of GOTO. Many programmers at that time considered using GOTO as a bad style in programming.

1980s. This era started the revolutionized programming languages. For instance, C++ made way for a programming language capable of object-oriented as well as systems programming styles. Although languages were not invented for new paradigms, these became evolved versions of past inventions. Some important inventions in computer languages during this age were Ada, C++, Eiffel, Perl, and FL.

1990s. Rapid application development (RAD) languages were invented and were all object-oriented. Included among these are C#, Visual Basic, Object Pascal, and Java. Other important programming languages invented in this age are Haskell, Python, Ruby, Lua, JavaScript, PHP, and JavaFX Script.

Today, programming languages provide more security and mobility. These can now produce complex programs using simple processes, as compared with the C++ languages and 4GL languages.