History and Evolution of Computer Programming Languages

Good day buddies, I hope you enjoyed your weekend? I will like to officially welcome you to another interesting field and the basis of computing.

Don’t expect me to start with the definition of programming language or what is a programming language or what is the importance of computer programming languages, in fact, I will assume that we are all programmers, though I will not say a developer.

No doubt,

If (you are reading this post && you have an account with steemit && you have been writing and getting upvotes from SteemStem)
{
Print ‘You must have written little code when structuring the content of your article:’;
Print ‘You must have written or familiar with HTML tag’;
Print ‘No doubt, you must have linked your Labeled for reuse image to its source before’;
Print ‘No doubt, you must have been engaging with the SteemStem community’;

If (you have done at least one of these before)
{
It suffices to say you are not new to programming and as such you don’t have to be told that programming is a set of instruction written in a particular order in order to accomplish a task;
}

Else
Print ‘You need to work more on structuring the content of your post in order to enhance its readability and visibility;
}

Ooh, sorry for bothering you with a simple If-else structure as I don't have the intention of doing it here today, but if you can decode all have written so far, then programming must be simple to you.

_{[Image form: flickr]}

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History and Evolution of Programming Languages

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Ever wonder who first introduced programming language, what lead to the programming language and how did programming language evolved.

with the history of a computer, which actually starts 2000 years ago, then the basis of programming language can be traced back to the era before since things do not always exist without a prototype

The basis and foundation of Computer Programming Languages can be traced back to the work of Joseph-Marie Jacquard called ‘The Jacquard system’ which was developed in France between 1804-1805, this serves as an improvement on the initial punched card developed by Jacques de Vaucanson's loom in 1745. Though this cannot be referred to as programming language in today’s information and communication technology world since it did not perform computation and logic function, it served as a basis which eventually lead to Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, and Lovelace Ada 1842 deconstruction of his work which led to the first computer program.

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The Jacquard system (1804-1805)

The Image to the right is the power loom invented by a Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard, this power loom consist of a punched cards which serves as a central processing unit, controlling the action of the loom by enabling production of intricate woven patterns upon a pattern read automatically from punched wooden cards, usually joined together by rope. Research confirmed that descendants of these punched cards have been in the industry and use ever since.

Let's watch how it works here

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Analytical Engine by Charles Babbage (Dec. 1791 – Oct. 1871)

Although, Charles Babbage did not develop or write down an explicit set of instructions for his analytical engine in the form of a modern computer program. However, his program was showing the lists of states during their execution and what operator was run at each step.

Unlike the Jacquard system which did not perform both computation and logic function. The Analytical Engine was designed to have incorporated an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and flow of control which is in the form of conditional-branching and repetitive loops. It was incorporated with integrated memory, though Charles Babbage was never able to complete the construction of any of his machines due to the conflicts he had with his engineer and inadequate funding but it served as the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete.

--- After the Jacquard system and Charles Babbage work, it took almost 100 years before the invention of the first electrical programmable computers, though the machine close assembly language which makes use of mnemonics was invented in the 1940s, it was probably the first human-readable computer programming language. --- --- _{No doubt, the design and development of what we can call ‘the first computer languages’ started between 1940-1950. From machine code to assembler language was a natural step which took almost five years of work to produce what we can call Fortran 1} ---

_{By 1950s computer engineers had the perception that machine –close assembly language was error-prone and too laborious to develop the entire systems and this lead to the development of the first modern programming language in 1955: FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator), ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language), LISP (LISt Processor) and COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) followed in the next few years and the rest is history.}

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Research has made it known that almost every language in use today is a descendant or derived from one of these aforementioned first four modern programming languages and indeed, FORTRAN, COBOL, and LISP are still actively used by large in industry.

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The 1980s

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Below programming languages were created and dominated the industry in the 1980s

Date	Programming Language
1980	C++ (as C with classes, renamed in 1983)
1983	Ada
1984	Common Lisp
1984	MATLAB
1984	dBase III, dBase III Plus
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)

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The 1990s: the Internet age

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Below programming languages were created and dominated the industry in the 1990s

Date	Programming Language
1990	Haskell
1991	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

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The 2000 and Beyond

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Below programming languages were created and dominated the industry in the 2000 and beyond

Date	Programming Language
2000	ActionScript
2001	C#
2001	D
2002	Scratch
2003	Groovy
2003	Scala
2005	F#
2006	PowerShell
2007	Clojure
2009	Go
2010	Rust
2011	Dart
2011	Kotlin
2011	Red
2011	Elixir
2012	Julia
2014	Swift
2016	Ring

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Conclusions

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Most times, the history of the computer is usually detailed in terms of the size, generation (hardware technology), purpose and data process, Computing is not just about hardware technology (electronics), there is always another side to the coin.
Computing world can also be viewed in terms of programming and the history and evolution of programming languages contains much of the real story of computing.

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Thanks for reading through, your thoughts are important.
Until my next post,
keep on sending zeroes and ones.

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References
_{1801: Punched cards control Jacquard loom
Analytical Engine
History of programming languages
Jacquard loom
History of Computer Languages - The Classical Decade, 1950s}

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_{All images are from free source websites}

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