Most senior developers who have been in the industry for more than 10–15 years have probably heard of these languages. Many of them might work on these languages too.
But not all of these languages are not dead, and many of them are not totally forgotten. Let’s learn some history of programming languages! You will have fun.
The Languages
COBOL
COBOL is an acronym for “common business-oriented language”. It’s compiled an English-like programming language designed for business use.
COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL, and at that time, languages were either used for engineering computations or managing data. Cobol was used in business, finance, and government. COBOL was one of the four key languages, along with ALGOL, LISP, and FORTRAN.
COBOL’s most important addition was the concept of record data.
Why COBOL become dead
Retirement of experienced COBOL developers.
COBOL was very complex, even for today’s languages.
Declining popularity.
COBOL compilers lagged contemporaries on microcomputers and minicomputers.
ALGOL
ALGOL was developed in 1958. ALGOL was used heavily by ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) for describing algorithms in textbooks for more than thirty years. It also influences many other languages.
COBOL still powers a lot of systems, but ALGOL is dead! Most of the programmers have never heard of ALGOL. But it was very significant. ALGOL was the first language to combine seamlessly imperative effects with the lambda calculus.
Why ALGOL become dead
It was a research language. So it lacks many attributes to use in a commercial project. Like it didn’t define any I/O.
BASIC
BASIC( Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was a high-level programming language whose design philosophy was to emphasize ease to use. It was released in 1964.
When Kemeny and Kurtz developed a Time-Sharing System (DTSS), multiple users could edit and run BASIC programs simultaneously. This model became very popular in the minicomputer systems in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Many early video games were based on different versions of BASIC. Its biggest social impact was it brought programming to households. Many influential and popular programmers from the ’80s and 90’s started their programming careers with BASIC.
Microsoft later turned BASIC into Visual Basic, which they used as office macro language.
Why Basic became dead
Newer machines in the 1990s came with greater capabilities. Programming languages like C or Pascal became more tenable.
In 1991, Microsoft released Visual Basic ( an updated version). VB remains a major language in the form of the VB dot net.
SIMULA 67
Simula 67 can be called the first object-oriented language though it was not truly an OOP. It was a superset of Algol-60. C++ compares to C is more or less like Simula to Algol-60.
Simula introduced some important concepts of programming languages. Like coroutines, instance variables, classes, methods, etc.
Why Simula became dead
Simula was very slow to use at scale.
Yes!! It was really slow.
Smalltalk
Smalltalk might be the most popular among all of these. The first version was the Smalltalk-72. Smalltalk-76 introduces OOP to the wider world, and version-80 was the one that got mass adoption.
Smalltalk was the first truly object-oriented programming language. Simula had objects but also had primitives like booleans or numbers. On the contrary, booleans were also objects in Smalltalk.
Why Smalltalk become dead
C++ became more popular and handy.
It had poor run-time issues.
Java overtook smalltalk
Conclusion
The Encyclopaedia of Programming Languages lists over 8,000 programming languages. Most languages totally died. Maybe after 30–40 years, we will have many more new languages, and the languages we are using today will be dead.
But most of the influential programming languages introduced something new or important. History is complicated and beautiful.
(javascript.plainenglish.io)
SEO
0 Σχόλια