Programming Languages
A program is one of the most popular words, we use in our regular life. In general, the program means an occasion. That means we are doing some event, because of some purpose. Similarly, in computers also, we are going to do tasks with the help of programs. Actually, before writing this article, my daughter asked me a bunch of questions. Those questions make me motivate to collect and share the following information about programming languages. Let us start our discussion about programming languages with meaning.
For doing things with computers, we must provide commands to the computer in the form of statements. All these statements are known as Instructions. That means, before assigning all these instructions to the computer, we must group these instructions together as a block.
This group of instructions to complete a task successfully is known as a Program. Of course, some programs are not executed successfully, means that the result of those programs, may not help for users. Even though there is no use with that type of statements, we call them as programs. In my point of view, those are known as Virus Programs.
Whatever may be, a successful or unsuccessful group of instruction given to a computer to perform a certain task is known as a Program. That means to assign work to the computer, we must provide with a group of instructions/commands/statements. To do this, we use a language known as Programming Language. There are so many programming languages are available. A programmer(who writes the program) his choose his convenient language to write the program. Usually, we write instructions in normal public using language like English. So, these languages are known as High-Level languages. Once, we wrote a program using any high-level language, that has to be translated to machine understandable language(Low-Level Language). This responsibility has been taken by either compiler or interpreter. So, technically saying, a Programming language is a special language used by programmers to develop applications. The first programming language was developed by Konrad Zuse is Plankalkul in between 1943 and 1945. But it actually came in practice in 1998.
Now I would like to introduce few important(according to me) programming languages. Let's begin our tour.
1957-1960:
FORTRAN
FORTRAN stands for FORmula TRANslator/TRANslation. It was the first and oldest computer programming language developed at IBM by John Backus. The first version was released in the year 1957 for the computer model IBM 704. In 1958, IBM released FORTRAN II( Second version of FORTRAN) with functions and subroutines. In 1966, ANSI (American National Standard Institute) released FORTRAN 66. It was the first Formal Standard Programming language. In 1977, X3J3(ANSI FORTRAN Standards Committee) added true block IF statement, direct access I/O, Character Data type, Parameter Statement for defining Constants and released with name FORTRAN 77. This version becomes most popular used programming version. In 1991, ISO(International Standard Organization) released FORTRAN 90.
LISP
LISP stands for LISt Processor. It was developed by John McCarthy in 1960. Based on the idea: Computing is done with symbols rather than numbers, LISP was designed. Usually, it is used in Artificial Intelligence research Program.
COBOL
COBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language. It was developed in 1959 by CODASYL(Conference on Data Systems Languages). It is the second oldest high-level programming language. It was developed by Grace Hopper and Bob Bemer. In 1968, ANSI(American National Standards Institute) developed a standard form of language known as ANS COBOL. Again in 1974, ANSI released revised version. By adding new features, in 1985 ANSI published another version. COBOL 97 version has both conventional and object-oriented features. COBOL is very good for solving business problems.
1970:
PASCAL
PASCAL is a high-level programming language. It is also known as general purpose programming language. It was developed by Niklaus Wirth in the year 1970. Pascal is based on Algol(Algorithmic Language). PASCAL is not an acronym. It was named with 17th-century mathematician Blaise Pascal. It is strongly typed language. It comes with several data types like records, sets, files and arrays. It supports with functions and procedures.
1972:
C-Programming Language
C Programming language was designed at Bell Laboratories in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie. It is the branch of BCPL(Basic Combined Programming Language). In 1978, The C programming language was published by Kernighan and Ritchie. In 1983, ANSI started a project for a standard version of C. In 1988, ANSI released standard version known as ANSI C. C-programming language has so many features like Reliability, Flexibility, Modularity, Portability, Interactivity, Efficiency, and Effectiveness. UNIX operating system was developed by using this C-Language. This language is used to develop verity of system applications like Graphics Package, Database Systems, Spreadsheets, Word processors, Operating Systems, Compilers, Assemblers, Interpreters and Network Drivers.
1983:
C++
The title C++ is originated with "C with Classes". C++ is a high-level programming language. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in the year 1979. The first C with Classes was called Cfront. it was derived from C-compiler Cpre. In 1983, the name C with Classes changed to C++. In 1985, C++ programming language was released. In 1990, Annotated C++ reference manual has been released. In 1998, first International Standard for C++ ISO/IEC 14882:1998. Informally this is known as C++98. C++ includes with object-oriented features such as classes, inheritance, abstraction, encapsulation and polymorphism. C++ continues to be updated. In 2011, current version C++11 has released.
1987:
PERL
PERL is the short form of Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. It is an Open Source Programming Language, designed by Larry Wall in the year 1987. This language is very similar to C-Programming language. In 1988, PERL II with regular expression engine feature was released. By adding support for binary data streams, in 1989, PERL III was released. In 1993 and 1994, PERL IV and PERL V were released successively. On 13 March 1995, PERL 5.001 was released. On July 22, 1998, PERL 5.005 was released. On March 22, 2000, PERL 5.6 was released with 64-bit support. The latest version PERL 5.13.9 released on 21 January 2011 by Jesse Vincent. It is the most commonly used language for CGI(Common Gateway Interface) scripts.
1991:
PYTHON
Python was developed by Guido Van Rossum in the year 1991. It is an Interactive, Interpreted, Object-Oriented Programming language. The first implementation standard was released in the year of 1989. Version 0.9.0 was released on 20 February 1991. Later , in this month itself, version 0.9.1 was released. During last months of 1991, version 0.9.2 was released. On 24 December 1991 version 0.9.4 was released. After continued updated versions, the latest version Python 3.0 was released on 3 December 2008. In the version 3.0, print function made as a built-in function and changed integer built-in functionality. Ex: in Python 2, result for 7/2=3. But in Python 3 the result is 3.5. Its main syntax and some aspects are taken from the basic language ABC. At the same time some syntax provided by the C-Programming Language. Regular expressions for string manipulations are based on PERL. In some cases, additions and some syntactical choices were strongly influenced by the JAVA language.
1993:
RUBY
RUBY is a high-level programming language. It is also known as general purpose programming language. It is an open-source, object-oriented programming language. It is mainly focused on simplicity and productivity. A framework knows as Ruby on Rails is using developing web programming. The first version Ruby 0.95 was released in the year 1995, Later the version RUBY 1.9.3 was released in the year 2011. It was designed and developed by Yukihiro Matz Matsumoto in Japan in the year 1990. RUBY was influenced by Smalltalk, Perl, Eiffel, Lisp and Ada. It has a dynamic type of system and automatic memory management. It is having four levels of variable scopes which include, Class, Local, Global and Instance. It supports Exception Handling, Operator Overloading, Garbage Collection and default arguments. It is having centralized package management through RubyGems. It is also implemented on all major platforms. It is having a large library modules for HTTP(Hyper Text Transfor Protocol), FTP(File Transfer Protocol), YAML(Yet Another Markup Language), XML(Extensible Markup Language), JSON(JavaScript Object Notation), OpenSSL(Open Secure Sockets Layer), RSS(Really Simple Syndication), Tk, Curses, and Zlib(Zip Library). The syntax of Ruby is most similar to Python and Perl.
1995:
JAVA
JAVA Programming language was developed by James Gosling at Sun Micro Systems in the year 1995. The original name for JAVA is Oak. This language is popularly used for developing Internet Applications. With the Help of this JAVA programming Language, We can develop Web applications as well as Network Programming and Standard alone applications. Today JAVA is owned by Oracle.
In beginning days, Java starts with a group of team members known as Green Team. In the year June 1991 James Gosling, Patrick Naughton and Mike Sheridan were initiated Java language project. In the beginning days, it was designed for small and embedded systems in electronic devices like set-up boxes. It was Greentalk and has the extension .gt .Later as a part of Green project, it was named as Oak. In the year 1995, Oak was renamed with JAVA. Because Oak is already used as the trademark for Oak Technologies. There were several versions of Java has been released. They are, In 1995, JDK Alpha and Beta version, On 23 January, 1996 JDK1.0, On 19 February, 1997 JDK1.1, On 8 December, 1998 J2SE1.2, On 8 May, 2000 J2SE1.3, On 6 February 2002 J2SE1.4, On 30 September 2004 J2SE5.0, On 11 December 2006 JAVA SE6, On 28 July 2011 JAVA SE11, On 18 March 2014 JAVA SE8 were released.
JAVA includes features like Simple, Object-Oriented, Platform Independent, Robust, Secured, Architecture neutral, Dynamic, Portable, Interpreted, High Performance, Multi-threaded and Distributed.
PHP
PHP Stands for Hypertext Pre Processor. It was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf in the year 1994. On June 8, 1995, PHP has been publicly released. The main purpose of PHP is to develop Dynamic Web Pages deals with databases. It is a Server side Interpreted scripting Language. PHP takes most of its syntaxes from C-Programming Language. PHP runs on Web Server. PHP developers can be classified as Web Developers or Software Developers. PHP code may be included into HTML code or it can be used in combination of different web templates, web content management, web frameworks.
JAVASCRIPT
JavaScript was developed by Brendan Eich, which was initially known as LiveScript. In the year May,1995 LiveScript was renamed with JavaScript. It is an Client-Side scripting Language. That means it executed on Client machine web browsers. JavaScript allows us to insert into our web page. JavaScript mostly placed in HTML(Hyper Text Markup Language) or ASP(Active Server Pages) files.
JavaScript comes with features like, Variables, Objects, Arrays, Operators, Methods, Functions, Conditional Statements ,Loops, Event Handlers and Comments.
With all this information, I hope you will get a brief introduction and information about various programming languages and their unique features. See you in my next article. Finally, Please feel free to give comments and suggestions in the below section.
Thank You.
