Evolution of Programming anguages.

Essay by divHigh School, 10th gradeA-, March 2004

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The history of Computer Programming Languages goes as back as to early 1800s when Ada Byron King, countess Lovelace, made the first ever computer program. Being a University student, she eventually came to work with Charles Babbage, founding member of Royal Astronomical Society in Britain. As Charles concentrated in designing hardware, Ada became the first person to develop a set of instructions. This came to be known as 'a computer program' for Charles' 'Analytical Engine.' Ever since, more and more programs have been created, tested, improved, and rebuilt. Right from the first computer program built by Ada Byron in the early 1800s to the advanced programs like C++ (Bjarne Stroustrup) and Java (James Gosling) in the 1990s, the evolution has been tremendous. Some of the programs during this evolution were: -

*FORTRAN (1957 by Backhus)

*COBOL (1959 by Grace M. Hooper)

*BASIC (1964 by John G. Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz)

*LOGO (1966 by Seymour Papert)

*Pascal (1970 by Niklaus Wirth)

*Ada (1977 by Dennis Ritchie)

*C (1980 by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan)

*Turing (1984 by Ric Holt and James Cordy)

*C++ (1986 by Bjarne Stroustrup)

*Java (1991 by James Gosling)

The first programs could only buffer codes of ones and twos (1s and 2s).

But owing to advancements in technology and the development of the genius machine changed all this. In 1951, Grace Hooper wrote the first compiler known as 'A-0'. A compiler is a program that converts normal language statements into the form of 0s and 1s that the computers could read. This directed to faster and more efficient programming.

However, it was not before 1957 when the first major language emerged in the form of FORTRAN-FORmula TRANslating system. It was designed for scientific computing by IBM. Its components were very simple and pretty easy to understand. In...