History of

programming
languages

The history of programming languages spans from documentation of early mechanical

computers to modern tools for software development. Early programming languages were
highly specialized, relying on mathematical notation and similarly obscure syntax.[1] Throughout
the 20th century, research in compiler theory led to the creation of high-level programming
languages, which use a more accessible syntax to communicate instructions.

The first high-level programming language was Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse between
1942 and 1945.[2] The first high-level language to have an associated compiler was created by
Corrado Böhm in 1951, for his PhD thesis.[3] The first commercially available language was
FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), developed in 1956 (first manual appeared in 1956, but first
developed in 1954) by a team led by John Backus at IBM.

Early history

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 of historians as the world's first published
computer program.[4]

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

Jacquard Looms and Charles Babbage's Difference Engine both had simple languages for
describing the actions that these machines should perform hence they were the creators of the
first programming language.

First programming languages

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.[5]

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.[6] Unlike
machine code, Short Code statements represented mathematical expressions in understandable
form. However, the program had to be translated into machine code every time it ran, making the
process much slower than running the equivalent machine code.

In the early 1950s, Alick Glennie developed Autocode, possibly the first compiled programming
language, at the University of Manchester. In 1954, a second iteration of the language, known as
the "Mark 1 Autocode," was developed for the Mark 1 by R. A. Brooker. Brooker also developed
an autocode for the Ferranti Mercury in the 1950s in conjunction with the University of
Manchester. 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.

In 1954, FORTRAN was invented at IBM by a team led by John Backus; it was the first widely
used high-level general purpose programming language to have a functional implementation, as
opposed to just a design on paper.[7][8] When FORTRAN was first introduced, it was viewed with
skepticism due to bugs, delays in development, and the comparative efficiency of "hand-coded"
programs written in assembly.[9] However, in a hardware market that was rapidly evolving; the
language eventually became known for its efficiency. It is still a popular language for high-
performance computing[10] and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's
fastest supercomputers.[11]

Another early programming language was devised by Grace Hopper in the US, called 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
programming language and implemented a prototype.[12] The FLOW-MATIC compiler became
publicly available in early 1958 and was substantially complete in 1959.[13] Flow-Matic was a
major influence in the design of COBOL, since only it and its direct descendant AIMACO were in
actual use at the time.[14]

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.
Algol 60 was particularly influential in the design of later languages, some of which soon
became more popular. The Burroughs large systems were designed to be programmed in an
extended subset of Algol.

Algol's key ideas were continued, producing ALGOL 68:

syntax and semantics became even more orthogonal, with anonymous routines, a recursive
typing system with higher-order functions, etc.;

not only the context-free part, but the full language syntax and semantics were defined
formally, in terms of Van Wijngaarden grammar, a formalism designed specifically for this
purpose.

Algol 68's many little-used language features (for example, concurrent and parallel blocks) and
its complex system of syntactic shortcuts and automatic type coercions made it unpopular with
implementers and gained it a reputation of being difficult. Niklaus Wirth actually walked out of
the design committee to create the simpler Pascal language.

Fortran

Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:

1951 – Regional Assembly Language

1952 – Autocode

1954 – IPL (forerunner to LISP)

1955 – FLOW-MATIC (led to COBOL)

 1957 – FORTRAN (first compiler)

1957 – COMTRAN (precursor to COBOL)

1958 – LISP

1958 – ALGOL 58

1959 – FACT (forerunner to COBOL)

1959 – COBOL

1959 – RPG

1962 – APL

1962 – Simula

1962 – SNOBOL

1963 – CPL (forerunner to C)

1964 – Speakeasy

1964 – BASIC

1964 – PL/I

1966 – JOSS

1966 – MUMPS

1967 – BCPL (forerunner to C)

Establishing fundamental paradigms

Scheme
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:

Speakeasy, developed in 1964 at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) by Stanley Cohen, is an

OOPS (object-oriented programming system, much like the later MATLAB, IDL and
Mathematica) numerical package. Speakeasy has a clear Fortran foundation syntax. It first
addressed efficient physics computation internally at ANL, was modified for research use (as
"Modeleasy") for the Federal Reserve Board in the early 1970s and then was made available
commercially; Speakeasy and Modeleasy are still in use currently.

Simula, invented in the late 1960s by Nygaard and Dahl as a superset of Algol 60, was the first
language designed to support object-oriented programming.

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
(NRAO).

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 Colmerauer, Roussel, and Kowalski, was the first logic
programming language.

ML built a polymorphic type system (invented by Robin Milner in 1973) on top of Lisp,[15]
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.

The 1960s and 1970s also saw considerable debate over the merits of "structured
programming", which essentially 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 did not include a "goto" at all, which forced structured
programming on the programmer.

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, or
driver function, 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)

1980s: consolidation, modules, performance

MATLAB

Erlang
Tcl

The 1980s were years of relative consolidation in imperative languages. Rather than inventing
new paradigms, all of these movements elaborated upon the ideas invented in the previous
decade. 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, a
functional language with lazy evaluation, 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).

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

The 1980s also brought advances in programming language implementation. The RISC
movement in computer architecture postulated that hardware should be designed for compilers
rather than for human assembly programmers. Aided by processor speed improvements that
enabled increasingly aggressive compilation techniques, the RISC movement sparked greater
interest in compilation technology for high-level languages.
Language technology continued along these lines well into the 1990s.

Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:

1980 – C++ (as C with classes, renamed in 1983)

1983 – Ada

1984 – Common Lisp

1984 – MATLAB

1984 – dBase III, dBase III Plus (Clipper and FoxPro as FoxBASE)

1985 – Eiffel

1986 – Objective-C

1986 – LabVIEW (Visual Programming Language)

1986 – Erlang

1987 – Perl

1988 – Tcl

1988 – Wolfram Language (as part of Mathematica, only got a separate name in June 2013)

1989 – FL (Backus)

1990s: the Internet age

Haskell
Lua

PHP

Rebol

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 IDE, garbage collection, and were descendants of older languages.
All such languages were object-oriented. These included Object Pascal, Visual Basic, and Java.
Java in particular received much attention.
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 notable languages that were developed in this period include:

1990 – Haskell

1990 – Python

1991 – Visual Basic

1993 – Lua

1993 – R

1994 – CLOS (part of ANSI Common Lisp)

1995 – Ruby

1995 – Ada 95

1995 – Java

1995 – Delphi (Object Pascal)

1995 – JavaScript

1995 – PHP

1997 – Rebol

Current trends

Programming language evolution continues, in both industry and research. Some of the recent
trends have included:
D Programming Language

Groovy

PowerShell

Rust
Scratch

Increasing support for functional programming in mainstream languages used commercially,

including pure functional programming for making code easier to reason about and easier 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, XAML)

Increased interest in distribution and mobility.

Integration with databases, including XML and relational databases.

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

Early research into quantum computing programming languages (see list)

Early research in applying Artificial Intelligence techniques to generate code like using GPT-
3[16]

Some notable languages developed during this period include:[17][18]

2000 – ActionScript

2001 – C#
 2001 – D

2002 – Scratch

2003 – Groovy

2003 – Scala

2005 – F#

2005 – HolyC

2006 – PowerShell

2007 – Clojure

2008 – Nim

2009 – Go

2010 – Rust

2011 – Dart

2011 – Kotlin

2011 – Elixir

2012 – Julia

2012 – TypeScript

2014 – Swift

Other new programming languages include Red, Crystal, Elm, Hack, Haxe, Zig and Reason.

Key figures

Dennis Ritchie
Niklaus Wirth

Grace M. Hopper

Bjarne Stroustrup
Anders Hejlsberg

Guido van Rossum

Yukihiro Matsumoto

Some key people who helped develop programming languages:

Alan Cooper, developer of Visual Basic.

Alan Kay, pioneering work on object-oriented programming, and originator of Smalltalk.

Anders Hejlsberg, developer of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript.

Arthur Whitney, developer of A+, k, and q.

Bertrand Meyer, inventor of Eiffel.

Bjarne Stroustrup, developer of C++.

Brad Cox, co-creator of Objective-C.

Brendan Eich, developer of JavaScript.

Brian Kernighan, co-author of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis
Ritchie, coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, the first concatenative programming language, and a
prominent name in stack machine microprocessor design.

Chris Lattner, creator of Swift and LLVM.

Cleve Moler, creator of MATLAB.

Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C. Unix Operating System, Plan 9 Operating System.

Douglas McIlroy, influenced and designed such languages as SNOBOL, TRAC, PL/I, ALTRAN,
TMG and C++.

Grace Hopper, first to use the term compiler and developer of FLOW-MATIC, influenced
development of COBOL. Popularized machine-independent programming languages and the
term "debugging".

Guido van Rossum, creator of Python.

James Gosling, lead developer of Java and its precursor, Oak.

Jean Ichbiah, chief designer of Ada, Ada 83.

Jean-Yves Girard, co-inventor of the polymorphic lambda calculus (System F).

Jeff Bezanson, main designer, and one of the core developers of Julia.

Jeffrey Snover, inventor of PowerShell.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang.

John Backus, inventor of Fortran and cooperated in the design of ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60.

John C. Reynolds, co-inventor of the polymorphic lambda calculus (System F).

John McCarthy, inventor of LISP.

John von Neumann, originator of the operating system concept.

Graydon Hoare, inventor of Rust.

Ken Thompson, inventor of B, Go, Inferno (operating system) and Unix Operating System co-
author.

Kenneth E. Iverson, developer of APL, and co-developer of J along with Roger Hui.

Konrad Zuse, designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül (which
influenced ALGOL 58[19]).

Kristen Nygaard, pioneered object-oriented programming, co-invented Simula.

Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language (see Perl and Raku).

Martin Odersky, creator of Scala, and previously a contributor to the design of Java.

Martin Richards developed the BCPL programming language, forerunner of the B and C
languages.

Nathaniel Rochester, inventor of first assembler (IBM 701).

Niklaus Wirth, inventor of Pascal, Modula and Oberon.

Ole-Johan Dahl, pioneered object-oriented programming, co-invented Simula.

Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP.

Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure.

Jean Paoli, co-creater of XML

Robert Gentleman, co-creator of R.

Robert Griesemer, co-creator of Go.

Robin Milner, inventor of ML, and sharing credit for Hindley–Milner polymorphic type
inference.

Rob Pike, co-creator of Go, Inferno (operating system) and Plan 9 (operating system)
Operating System co-author.

Ross Ihaka, co-creator of R.

Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js.

Stanley Cohen, inventor of Speakeasy, which was created with an OOPS, object-oriented
programming system, the first instance, in 1964.

Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica.

Terry A. Davis, creator of HolyC.

 Walter Bright, creator of D.

Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby.

See also

ACM

SIGPLAN

History of Programming Languages Conference

History of compiler writing

History of computing hardware

Programming language

Timeline of computing

Timeline of programming languages

List of programming languages

List of programmers

References

1. Hopper (1978) p. 16.

2. Knuth, Donald E.; Pardo, Luis Trabb. "Early development of programming languages".
Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology. Marcel Dekker. 7: 419–493.

3. Corrado Böhm's PhD thesis (http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:32719/eth-32719-0

2.pdf)

4. J. Fuegi and J. Francis (October–December 2003), "Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of
the 1843 'notes' ", Annals of the History of Computing, 25 (4): 16–26,
doi:10.1109/MAHC.2003.1253887 (https://doi.org/10.1109%2FMAHC.2003.1253887)

5. In 1998 and 2000 compilers were created for the language as a historical exercise. Rojas,
Raúl, et al. (2000). "Plankalkül: The First High-Level Programming Language and its
Implementation". Institut frame Informatik, Freie Universität Berlin, Technical Report B-3/2000.
(full text) (http://ftp.mi.fu-berlin.de/pub/reports/TR-B-00-03.pdf)

6. Sebesta, W.S. (2006). Concepts of Programming Languages. p. 44. ISBN 978-0-321-33025-3.

 7. "Fortran creator John Backus dies - Tech and gadgets- NBC News" (http://www.nbcnews.co
m/id/17704662) . NBC News. 2007-03-20. Retrieved 2010-04-25.

8. "CSC-302 99S : Class 02: A Brief History of Programming Languages" (https://web.archive.or

g/web/20100715042920/http://www.math.grin.edu/~rebelsky/Courses/CS302/99S/Outlines/
outline.02.html) . Math.grin.edu. Archived from the original (http://www.math.grin.edu/~rebel
sky/Courses/CS302/99S/Outlines/outline.02.html) on 2010-07-15. Retrieved 2010-04-25.

9. Padua, David (Feb 2000). "The FORTRAN I Compiler" (http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~lacher/courses/

COT4401/notes/cise_v2_i1/fortran.pdf) (PDF). Computing in Science and Engineering. 2 (1):
70–75. doi:10.1109/5992.814661 (https://doi.org/10.1109%2F5992.814661) . Retrieved
7 November 2019.

10. Eugene Loh (18 June 2010). "The Ideal HPC Programming Language" (http://queue.acm.org/d
etail.cfm?id=1820518) . Queue. Association of Computing Machines. 8 (6).

11. "HPL - A Portable Implementation of the High-Performance Linpack Benchmark for

Distributed-Memory Computers" (http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/hpl) . Retrieved
2015-02-21.

12. Hopper (1978) p. 16.

13. Sammet (1969) p. 316

14. Sammet (1978) p. 204.

15. Gordon, Michael J. C. (1996). "From LCF to HOL: a short history" (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~m
jcg/papers/HolHistory.pdf) (PDF). p. 3. Retrieved 2015-05-04. "Edinburgh LCF, including the
ML interpreter, was implemented in Lisp."

16. Manjoo, Farhad (July 29, 2020). "How Do You Know a Human Wrote This?" (https://www.nytim
es.com/2020/07/29/opinion/gpt-3-ai-automation.html?) . The New York Times. ISSN 0362-
4331 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0362-4331) . Retrieved August 4, 2020.

17. TIOBE (25 May 2018). "TIOBE Index, Top 100 programming languages according to TIOBE
Index" (https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/) . www.tiobe.com. TIOBE_index.

18. "GitHub's Octoverse 2018" (https://web.archive.org/web/20190322190823/https://octoverse.

github.com/projects) . Archived from the original (https://octoverse.github.com/projects)
on 2019-03-22.
19. Rojas, Raúl; Hashagen, Ulf (2002). The First Computers: History and Architectures (https://boo
ks.google.com/books?id=nDWPW9uwZPAC&q=algol-68+konrad+zuse&pg=PA292) . MIT
Press. p. 292. ISBN 978-0262681377. Retrieved October 25, 2013.

Further reading

Rosen, Saul, (editor), Programming Systems and Languages, McGraw-Hill, 1967.

Sammet, Jean E., Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals, Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Sammet, Jean E. (July 1972). "Programming Languages: History and Future". Communications
of the ACM. 15 (7): 601–610. doi:10.1145/361454.361485 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F36145
4.361485) . S2CID 2003242 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:2003242) .

Richard L. Wexelblat (ed.): History of Programming Languages, Academic Press 1981.

Thomas J. Bergin and Richard G. Gibson (eds.): History of Programming Languages, Addison
Wesley, 1996.

Sebesta, Robert W. Concepts of programming languages. Pearson Education India, 2004.

External links

History and evolution of programming languages (http://www.scriptol.com/programming/hist

ory.php)

Graph of programming language history (http://www.levenez.com/lang/history.html)

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