Evolution of computer programming

 

When Charles Babbage made the computer, he had yet to
figure out about how to give the machine instructions. The first ever
programming language was written by Ada Lovelace in the year of 1883. The code
was for computing Bernoulli’s number and hence that was the first time the
computing power of the machine was seen in action.



In the 1949, Assembly language, a type of low-level
language, came into play.it only consists of symbols/instructions that only
computer can understand and interpret. It is still used till this day in the
aviation systems and medical equipment.



The first complied computer program is Autocode and
was developed by Alick Glennie in the year 1952.



In the year of 1957, FORTRAN was developed for numeric
and scientific calculations. The program developed by John Backus and IBM. This
was the first optimizing compiler. It was used for scientific purposes like for
computing numerical weather predictions, fluid dynamics, geophysics, crystallography,
computational chemistry etc. It was in the software for NASA probes voyager-1
and voyager-2. With years it came with different and better versions.



Algorithmic language, also known as ALGOL, was the
first programming language to implement nested function and had a simpler syntax
than that of the FORTRAN. It was built in the year 1958. It is family of
interactive computer programming languages. It used the code block like, ‘begin’
to start and ’end’ to end the code. It was designed to avoid some of the
problems in FORTRAN. Iwas designed by Baue, Bottenbruch, Rutishauser, Samelson,
Backus, Katz, Perlis, Wegstein,Naur, Vanquois, van Wijingarden, Wooder ,Green, McCarthy.



COBOL, also known as Common Business-Oriented
Language. As the name suggests the code was specifically useful in business. In
19777, 80% of the world’s business was handled by COBOL. It is widely used for
applications deployed on mainframe computer. It was developed by Howard
Bromberg, Norman Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden,
Gertrude Tierney along with the indirect influence from Grace Hopper.



By 1964, we had BASIC. It stands for Beginners
All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. In the year 1991, Microsoft came out
with Visual Basic, an updated version of the previous one. The first
microcomputer version was developed by Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Monte
Davidoff for their company Microsoft, right after they formed it.



And one of the most commonly used computer programming,
and the mother of almost all higher-level languages, C, came into existence in
the year of 1972. It is a procedural language. All the codes that were previously
written in assembly language was replaced by C. Those include operating systems
like Kernel and others. It can be used by implementing an operating system, embedded
system and also website using CGI- Common Gateway Interface.