The Evolution of Programming Languages
You may have seen how a computer device multi tasks with efficiency and follows the users command strictly. Ever wondered how they understand our commands?
Yes, through programming languages, it is a fundamental unit in today’s tech world. If you are from a non-IT background you might have come across some words like C, Python and JAVA. These are some widely used programming languages used in 21st century.
Programming language are of 3 types:
1)Machine Language: similar to binary, 1 and 0 can only be used to write a command
2) Assembly language: the programmer does the operation which can be directly executed on a central processing unit (CPU). The language has certain drawbacks as it does not contain any variables or functions in programs and also the program is not portable on different processors.
3) High Level language: The development of higher-level language is done for a programmer to write a human-readable program that can be easily understood by any user. The syntax used and the programming style can be easily understood by humans if it is compared to low-level language.
How it started?
In 1883, Charles Babbage had made a device, the Analytic Engine but he could not figure out how to give it instructions so that it can perform some tasks.
There came Ada Lovelace the first computer programmer who designed algorithms for the machine. The computer successfully worked by computing Bernoulli’s number, the machine used punch cards for input and output!
In 1949, one more major change occurred in the computer world. Assembly Language was created which was only understood by computers and was difficult for every user to understand it.
In 1957, John Backus and IBM developed FORTAN, used for numeric computation and scientific computing. The language was used to write Software for NASA probes Voyager 1 & Voyager 2.
In two decades, languages like ALGOL, COBOL, BASIC were developed and then in 1972 came in C language, it is a popular language till date. It can be used in implementing an operating system, embedded system, and also on the website using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). It is the mother of all the languages.
C was succeeding and was widely used by all computer engineers. But if you compare it with languages developed in the last decade C is a language rarely used! Why so?
As you can see it took almost 17 lines to write an instruction. And the user should also remember certain syntax while using this. So, to write a program like this the user should know the data types and their format specifiers while writing in C. This is a small example but when C was used in making CGIs a lot of software, the users were finding it difficult and time consuming. And that is the reason a simpler language was developed named C++.
C++ is simpler to understand and write. Here while printing the user doesn’t need to check if he has put the right bracket or the format specifier. The user could easily cout which is print and cin which is scan. But this isn’t it. Moreover, inheritance is also possible in this language. User were still finding it a bit difficult to understand and write it correctly. There were high chances of missing out syntax just like C language.
And so came in Python….
Python is similar to English language. As you can see approx. 7 lines have been used to write a function that does the same work as the above 2 languages. Here the user just needs to have a basic idea about the syntax and they don’t need to learn any formant or access specifiers. Now python is being widely used by beginners in programming and the professional programmers who use it to make software and game development.
This is how programming languages have been evolving from just using 2 numbers to almost writing it like a language. There are possibilities that there might be simpler or advanced languages develop in future.