The Long and Fruitful History of Computer Programming

The Long and Fruitful History of Computer Programming

If the tale of programming has to be repeated, it would be prudent to start with Charles Babbage’s difference engine from 1822. From their earliest days as simple input devices, computers have relied on instructions to carry out the tasks given to them. Modern computer science is based on this set of directives.

When the difference engine was in use, the computations required manual gear changes. Everything changed when the ENIAC, a government machine built in the United States in 1942, used electrical impulses instead of physical movements. This machine was likewise designed with accepting programming in mind.

In 1945, while working at the Institute for Advanced Study, John Von Neumann came up with two crucial ideas that would later impact programming languages and make programming faster. The shared-program mechanism was the first idea. In keeping with this idea, the hardware could not be overly complicated or individually hardwired for each application. This sort of hardware could be controlled with complex instructions, which allowed for faster reprogramming.

Code blocks, often known as subroutines, were born from the second idea, “conditional control transfer,” and can be employed in any order. Logical branching was the next aspect of the idea. The idea of having reusable code chunks originated from this.

We saw the release of the Short Code language in 1949. It became the foundational language for computers and other electronic devices. The programmer was confined to using integers instead of statements in this language. Grace Hopper’s compiler, A-0, first appeared in 1951. For the computer, this application translated all the 0s and 1s. This resulted in significantly faster programming.

Introduced in 1957, FORTRAN (FORmula Translating System) was the first key language. For scientific calculations, it was custom-made for IBM. The GOTO, DO, and IF statements were all part of this language. Businesses weren’t FORTRAN’s strong suit, though. For simple numerical tasks, it worked well, but for complex calculations used in industry, it fell short.

The year 1959 saw the development of COBOL. A businessman’s language was its intended target. An essay, with its four or five parts that make up the main body, is analogous to the COBOL program. This simplified the learning process.

John McCarthy created the LISP language in 1958 for use in AI research; it was formerly known as Cambridge Polish. The reason this programming language is still in use today is because it is very particular and abstract. Lists can be stored and modified independently by the LISP.

It was also in that year that the Algol language was created. This was the original code for several other languages, including Pascal, C, C++, and Java. The Backus-Naar form (BNF), the first legitimate grammar, was also present in Algol. It was more difficult to use the subsequent version, Algol 68. Pascal was born out of this problem.

In 1968, Niklaus Wirth presented the Pascal programming language. Back then, it was an essential method of instruction. This language was a hybrid of ALGOL, FORTRAN, and COBOL. The pointer data representation was further refined by Pascal. Its failure stemmed from the fact that it did not have any variable groupings. After then, Modula-2 came out, but C had already won over a lot of users.

Unix made use of C, written by Dennis Ritchie in 1972, which was similar to Pascal but had B and BCPL as its ancestors. Additionally, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows all make use of it. It wasn’t until the 1980s that object-oriented programming (OOP) came into being. In 1983, this evolved into the C++ programming language. With this language, you can control numerous processes simultaneously. Language classes in Advanced Placement Computer Science are also offered in this format. Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, or Perl, was created in 1987.

In 1994, Java was the next big thing. It still has a long way to go, particularly with its sluggish programs. Still, many are optimistic about the language’s potential for growth in the years to come. Visual Basic (VB) and other Microsoft products that make use of widgets are likewise very popular.

Computer programming is just going to continue to advance in the years to come. Although it may have begun with a primitive approach, considering the languages used now, there have been so many advancements that we can only speculate as to what “impossibilities” may soon be made achievable.