Evolution of computer programming

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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.

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