History Of Programming Language
The first programming languages predate the modern computer.
During a nine-month period in 1842-1843, Ada Lovelace translated the memoir of Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea about Charles Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article she appended a set of notes which specified in complete detail a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the Engine recognized by some historians as the world's first computer program.
Herman Hollerith realized that he could encode information on punch cards when he observed that train conductors encode the appearance of the ticket holders on the train tickets using the position of punched holes on the tickets. Hollerith then encoded the 1890 census data on punch cards.
The first computer codes were specialized for their applications. In the first decades of the 20th century, numerical calculations were based on decimal numbers. Eventually it was realized that logic could be represented with numbers, not only with words. For example, Alonzo Church was able to express the lambda calculus in a formulaic way. The Turing machine was an abstraction of the operation of a tape-marking machine, for example, in use at the telephone companies. Turing machines set the basis for storage of programs as data in the von Neumann architecture of computers by representing a machine through a finite number. However, unlike the lambda calculus, Turing's code does not serve well as a basis for higher-level languages—its principal use is in rigorous analyses of algorithmic complexity.
Like many "firsts" in history, the first modern programming language is hard to identify. From the start, the restrictions of the hardware defined the language. Punch cards allowed 80 columns, but some of the columns had to be used for a sorting number on each card. FORTRAN included some keywords which were the same as English words, such as "IF", "GOTO" (go to) and "CONTINUE". The use of a magnetic drum for memory meant that computer programs also had to be interleaved with the rotations of the drum. Thus the programs were more hardware-dependent.
To some people, what was the first modern programming language depends on how much power and human-readability is required before the status of "programming language" is granted. Jacquard looms and Charles Babbage's Difference Engine both had simple, extremely limited languages for describing the actions that these machines should perform. One can even regard the punch holes on a player piano scroll as a limited domain-specific language, albeit not designed for human consumption.
During a nine-month period in 1842-1843, Ada Lovelace translated the memoir of Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea about Charles Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article she appended a set of notes which specified in complete detail a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the Engine recognized by some historians as the world's first computer program.
Herman Hollerith realized that he could encode information on punch cards when he observed that train conductors encode the appearance of the ticket holders on the train tickets using the position of punched holes on the tickets. Hollerith then encoded the 1890 census data on punch cards.
The first computer codes were specialized for their applications. In the first decades of the 20th century, numerical calculations were based on decimal numbers. Eventually it was realized that logic could be represented with numbers, not only with words. For example, Alonzo Church was able to express the lambda calculus in a formulaic way. The Turing machine was an abstraction of the operation of a tape-marking machine, for example, in use at the telephone companies. Turing machines set the basis for storage of programs as data in the von Neumann architecture of computers by representing a machine through a finite number. However, unlike the lambda calculus, Turing's code does not serve well as a basis for higher-level languages—its principal use is in rigorous analyses of algorithmic complexity.
Like many "firsts" in history, the first modern programming language is hard to identify. From the start, the restrictions of the hardware defined the language. Punch cards allowed 80 columns, but some of the columns had to be used for a sorting number on each card. FORTRAN included some keywords which were the same as English words, such as "IF", "GOTO" (go to) and "CONTINUE". The use of a magnetic drum for memory meant that computer programs also had to be interleaved with the rotations of the drum. Thus the programs were more hardware-dependent.
To some people, what was the first modern programming language depends on how much power and human-readability is required before the status of "programming language" is granted. Jacquard looms and Charles Babbage's Difference Engine both had simple, extremely limited languages for describing the actions that these machines should perform. One can even regard the punch holes on a player piano scroll as a limited domain-specific language, albeit not designed for human consumption.
One of the first widely-used programming languages was FORTRAN, developed in the 1950s by IBM. FORTRAN (short for Formula Translator) was designed to work with mathematical data.
- In 1958, a language called ALGOL (Algorithm Language) was developed. It was designed to compete with FORTRAN. The first version, which became known as ALGOL 58, was replaced in 1960 with ALGOL 60. ALGOL was never as widely accepted as FORTRAN.
- COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was created in 1960 to serve as the primary language for large-scale programs in government and business. COBOL is still in use on many computer systems today.
- In 1964, the BASIC language (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was first used. With BASIC, programming became available to a much wider range of people.
- In 1965, a language called PL/I was developed in hopes of being everything to everyone. It was designed to be used for both scientific and business purposes. PL/I was kind of a combination of COBOL, FORTRAN, and ALGOL 60. PL/I proved to be too complex. It met with only partial success.
- Simula I and Simula 67 are languages that had little very little impact in their time. However, Simula introduced the early concepts of object-oriented programming that influenced languages to come, such as C++.
- In the late 1960s, a Swiss professor named Niklaus Wirth developed a teaching language called Pascal. Pascal, and its successor Modula-2, introduced important concepts of programming structure that reduce errors and increase readability.
- Smalltalk is more than a programming language. Smalltalk represents a departure from the languages that preceeded it. Smalltalk is graphical and object-oriented. While Smalltalk is not as widely used as C++, the concepts developed with Smalltalk were important to the development and continued development of languages like C++ and Java.
- The C language was derived from ALGOL. And, of course, C++ is C with the addition of object-oriented concepts.
Contributors :
- Augusta Ada
- Doctor Konrad Zuse
- Alan Turing
- John Mauchly
- Grace Hopper
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The First Programmer: Ada Augusta
One important exception was the figure of Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace. Ada not only understood the brilliance of Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine; she also tried to illustrate this to others. Ironically, Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron, who penned a number of works that were very critical of Industrial Revolution technologies and their adverse effects upon the quality of human life.
One important exception was the figure of Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace. Ada not only understood the brilliance of Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine; she also tried to illustrate this to others. Ironically, Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron, who penned a number of works that were very critical of Industrial Revolution technologies and their adverse effects upon the quality of human life.
- Ada herself designed many sequences of Babbage's machine's basic operations that added up to substantive mathematical computations. For this reason, she is often called the first programmer. Impressively, she made use of a number of software design elements (such as the loop, in which an operation is repeated until a certain condition occurs) that are now fundamental to all programming languages.
- Ada's significance to the history of computing was marked by the naming of a programming language in her honor: Ada, developed in 1983 by the United States Department of Defense (with a follow-up version later, called Ada95).
- Ada was also the subject of a 1997 film by Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Conceiving Ada.
- Ada is only one of many important (and, sadly, under recognized) women in the history of computing.
- Ada is a language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in an attempt to standardize the languages used for DOD projects. Ada, which was developed in 1983, is large and complex.