History of Computer Programming

History of Programming Languages 

Punch cards

Jacquard looms

Analytical engine  (Charles Babbage and Ada Byron Lovelace)

US Census data (Herman Hollerith)

Hand-coded machine language programs

  10110000 01100001

Assembly language programs

  movl $3, %eax

Modern programming languages

Charles Babbage’s Analytic Engine 1834

Earliest known computer

Never fully built

Operations and variables on separate punch cards

Conditional jumps accomplished mechanically by physically jumping over a band of cards

Collaborator Lady Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace.

Babbage first computer scientist.  Ada Byron first computer programmer.

Von Neumann architecture 1945

Mathematician John von Neumann. Part of design of ENIAC, one of first electronic computers.

Computer in his design consists of small CPU, larger main memory, bus

Single CPU architecture still referred to as von Neumann machines.

EDVAC report (Electronic Discrete Variable Arithmetic Computer) describes the first stored program computer.

 Programming Language Generations

First Generation (late 1940s):

Machine-level programming languages

- Fast and efficient, executed directly on the CPU

- Consists only of 0s and 1s

- Difficult for humans to read, write, and debug

Second Generation (early 1950s):

- Symbolic assemblers

- Interpreting routines

- Very early compilers

Assembly languages

- Simple mnemonic instructions <opcode> <operands>

- Assembler translates into machine code

- Handcoding in assembly only for low-level needs

Third Generation (mid 1950s - present):

  High level, general-purpose

- FORTRAN, LISP, COBOL, ALGOL

- (Ada, Basic, C, C++, Java, Pascal, Smalltalk, …)

- Easier for humans to read, write, debug

- Compiler translates into machine code before running

- Interpreter translates into machine code at runtime

Fourth Generation (1970s - ):

  Specification languages, query languages, report generators, systems engineering

- Maple, Mathematica, Postscript, SPSS, SQL

Fifth Generation (1980s - ):

  Solve problems using constraints rather than algorithms, used in Artificial Intelligence

- Prolog

Konrad Zuse’s Plankalkül 1945

- Language for expressing computations

- Not published until 1972

- Anticipated many developments of programming languages

-Arrays, records

-Assertions

-Algorithms for sorting, numerical computations, syntax analysis, and chess 

Evolution of third-generation Languages
- Begins with FORTRAN in 1954
- Generation of high-level programming languages
- Languages stress expressivity and machine independence
- Programming is procedural
- Includes imperative, functional, compiler languages

FORTRAN (1954)

- Designed at IBM to efficiently translate mathematical formulas into IBM 704 machine code.  Wanted code at least as efficient as hand-coded.

- 1954 Report for a proposed Formula Translating System

- 1957 FORTRAN language manual published

- Translator produced code that in some cases was more efficient than the equivalent hand-coded program.

LISP (1958)

●Interactive functional language

●Designed for IBM 704 by John

  McCarthy at Dartmouth 1956-1958

●Implemented at MIT.  First reference

  manual published in 1960.

●Language based on lambda calculus. (Mathematical notation for expressing functions.)

●LISP was designed for symbolic formula manipulation.  Stands for LISt Processor.

●Has become standard language of the AI community

 

ALGOL (1958)
  ALGOrithmic Language

●Language description published in ALGOL60 report

●First appearance of Backus-Naur Form for programming language definition

●Widely used as a publication language for algorithms

 

 Cobol (1960)

●US Dept of Defense wanted

  “common” PL for data processing

●CODASYL committee (Conference on Data Systems Languages)

●Result was COBOL in 1960 (COmmon Business-Oriented Language)

●Grace Hopper was involved in development and wrote 1st compiler

●Designed to be machine independent, unlike FORTRAN.

●Influenced by Fortran, ALGOL58, and English.

APL ( early 1960s)

●A Programming Language

●Based on notation developed by Ken Iverson at Harvard 1957-1962.

●Functional, interactive, science-oriented language that assumes the array as the default data structure.

●Suitable for applications with a heavy use of numerical data in large multi-dimensional arrays.

●Used special symbols requiring special keyboard / printer

 BASIC (1964)

●Developed at Dartmouth in 1960’s by Tom Kurtz, John Kemeny, and a succession of undergraduates; first ran in 1964.

●Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instructional Code

●Intended to introduce students in non-scientific disciplines to computing.

●Influenced by FORTRAN and ALGOL.

PL/1 (1964) 

●Planned and designed by IBM as an extension to FORTRAN

●“Extension” departed from FORTRAN specs and was first released as NPL. Renamed PL/1 (Programming Language 1)

●Of interest in academic community because it had every element of language design.  Too big and complicated.

●Compiler sold separately from machine

Pascal (1970)

●Designed by Niklaus Wirth

●(member of ALGOL committee; he proposed

   a revision known as ALGOL-W in 1965)

●Pascal first implemented in 1970.

●In opposition to trend of PL/1 – ALGOL68 – Ada

●Named after 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal.

●Simple and elegant

●Widely used in academic community

●Interesting features:

●Case statement

●Facility for user-defined data types

●Record structure

C  (1972) 

●Designed by Kenneth Thompson

  and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in 1972.

●Designed for coding the routines of the UNIX operating system.

●“High level” systems programming language which created the notion of a portable operating system

●Concise syntax – programs somewhat hard to read, understand, debug, maintain

●No built-in operations for handling composite data types such as strings, sets, and lists.

●Not strongly typed.  No run-time type checking.  Easily leads to programming errors.

●Provides ability to code low-level operations in a high-level language.

Programming Language Paradigms
  Procedural: procedures, sequential execution of code are basic building blocks of program

-FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslating; John Backus, IBM, 1950s)

-ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language, 1958)

-COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language, 1960)

-BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,

                John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, Dartmouth, 1963)

-Pascal (Niklaus Wirth, 1970)

-C (Dennis Ritchie, Bell Labs, 1972)

Object-Oriented: Program is designed around the objects required to solve the problem

-Smalltalk (Alan Kay, Xerox PARC, 1971)

-Ada (US Dept of Defense, 1975)

-C++ (Bjarne Stroustrup, Bell Labs, 1983)

-Java (James Gosling, Sun Microsystems, 1995)

-C# (Microsoft, 2000)

Functional: Program is designed around the evaluation of functions, rather than modifying state

-LISP (John McCarthy, MIT, 1958)

-Common Lisp

-Dylan

-Logo

-Scheme

-ML (Robin Milner et al, Edinburgh, 1970s)

-Haskell (purely functional language, 1990)

Logic: Program is declarative, based on mathematical logic

-Prolog (1972)

  A program lists facts and rules, program execution is controlled deduction to answer a query.

Scripting languages (used for text processing, shells, HTML, CGI)

-awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kerningham, Bell labs, 1978)

-Perl (Larry Wall, NASA, 1987)

-Tcl/Tk (John Ousterhout, 1988)

-Python (Guido van Rossum, CWI, 1991)

-PHP (Rasmus Lerdorf, 1995)

-Ruby (Yukihiro Matsumoto, 1996)