Programming languages

There are two general types of languages—low-level and high-level. Low-level languages are similar to a computer's internal binary language, or machine language. They are difficult for humans to use, but they produce the fastest programs. High-level languages are less efficient but are easier to use because they more closely resemble spoken or mathematical languages.

The first high-level language for business data processing was called FLOW-MATIC. It was devised in the early 1950s by Grace Hopper, a United States Navy computer programmer. At that time, computers were also becoming an increasingly important scientific tool.

A team led by John Backus within the International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation began developing a language that would simplify the programming of complicated mathematical formulas. Completed in 1957, FORTRAN (Formula Translation) became the first comprehensive high-level programming language. Its importance was immediate and long-lasting, and newer versions of the language are still widely used in engineering and scientific applications.

FORTRAN manipulated numbers and equations efficiently, but it was not suited for business-related tasks, such as creating, moving, and processing data files.

Several computer manufacturers, with support from the United States government, jointly developed COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) in the early 1960s to address those needs. COBOL became the most important programming language for commercial and business-related applications, and newer versions of it are still widely used today.

John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, two professors at Dartmouth College, developed a simplified version of FORTRAN, called BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), in 1965. Considered too slow and inefficient for professional use, BASIC was nevertheless simple to learn and easy to use, and it became an important academic tool for teaching programming fundamentals to nonprofessional computer users. The explosion of microcomputer use beginning in the late 1970s transformed BASIC into a universal programming language. Because almost all microcomputers were sold with some version of BASIC included, millions of people now use the language, and tens of thousands of BASIC programs are now in common use. In the early 1990s the Microsoft Corporation enhanced BASIC with a GUI (graphic user interface) to create Visual Basic, which became a popular language for creating PC applications.

In 1968 Niklaus Wirth, a professor in Zürich, Switzerland, created Pascal, which he named after 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. Because it was a highly structured language that supported good programming techniques, it was often taught in universities during the 1970s and 1980s, and it still influences today's programming languages. Pascal was based on ALGOL (Algorithmic Language), a language that was popular in Europe during the 1960s.

Programs written in LISP (List Processing) manipulate symbolic (as opposed to numeric) data organized in list structures. Developed in the early 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the leadership of Professor John McCarthy, LISP is used mostly for artificial intelligence (AI) programming. Artificial intelligence programs attempt to make computers more useful by using the principles of human intelligence in their programming.

The language known as C is a fast and efficient language for many different computers and operating systems. Programmers often use C to write systems software, but many professional and commercial-quality applications also are written in C. Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories originally designed C in the early 1970s.

In 1979 the language Ada, designed at CII Honeywell Bull by an international team led by Jean Ichbiah, was chosen by the United States Department of Defense as its standardized language. It was named Ada, after Augusta Ada Byron, who worked with Charles Babbage in the mid-1800s and is credited with being the world's first programmer. The language Ada has been used to program embedded systems, which are integral parts of larger systems that control machinery, weapons, or factories.

Languages such as FORTRAN, Ada, and C are called procedural languages because programmers break their programs into subprograms and subroutines (also called procedures) to handle different parts of the programming problem. Such programs operate by “calling” the procedures one after another to solve the entire problem.

During the 1990s object-oriented programming (OOP) became popular. This style of programming allows programmers to construct their programs out of reusable “objects.” A software object can model a physical object in the real world. It consists of data that represents the object's state and code that defines the object's behavior. As an object called a sedan shares attributes with the more generic object called a car in the real world, a software object can inherit state and behavior from another object. The first popular language for object-oriented programming was C++, designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of Bell Laboratories in the mid-1980s. James Gosling of Sun Microsystems Corporation created a simplified version of C++ called Java in the mid-1990s. Java has since become popular for writing applications for the Internet.

Hundreds of programming languages or language variants exist today. Most were developed for writing specific types of applications. However, many companies insist on using the most common languages so they can take advantage of programs written elsewhere and to ensure that their programs are portable, which means that they will run on different computers.

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