CSci 450-01: Organization of Programming Languages
CSci 503-01: Fundamental Concepts in Languages
Fall 2014

History of Programming Languages

Note: These brief notes are similar to the instructor's unscripted remarks on this topic in CSci 450/503 during the lecture/discussion on 29 August 2014. It is based, in part, on the following references:

1. O'Reilly History of Programming Languages poster (displayed in class)
2. Wikipedia History of Programming Languages article

From the instructor's perspective, key languages and milestones include the following. (Some of these were pointed out by the instructor; others perhaps not.)

• Fortran, 1957; first compiler, math-like language for scientific programming, influenced many subsequent languages, still in use today (first language learned by instructor in 1974)
• Lisp, 1958; code and data have same format (homoiconic), related to Church's lambda calculus theory, recursion, syntactic macros, automatic storage management, higher order functions, influenced many subsequent languages/research, still in use today
• Algol, 1958, 1960; nested block structure, lexical scoping, BNF invented to define syntax, call by name parameter passing, greatly influenced most subsequent languages
• COBOL, 1959; Grace Hopper, business/accounting programming, still in use today
• Simula; 1962, 1967; original purpose for discrete-event simulation, first object-oriented language (in Scandinavian school)
• Snobol, 1962; string processing, patterns as first class data, backtracking on failure
• PL/I, 1964; IBM-designed language to merge scientific (Fortran), business (COBOL), and systems programming (second language learned by instructor in 1975)
• BASIC, 1964; interactive computing (timesharing, early microcomputers)
• Pascal, 1970; Niklaus Wirth's simplified Algol, structured programming, one-pass compiler, important for teaching in 1980s and 1990s (used by UM CIS in CS1 and CS2 until 1999)
• Prolog, 1972; logic programming
• C, 1972; systems programming language for Unix, widely in use today, influenced many subsequent languages
• Smalltalk, 1972; ground-up object-oriented programming language, message-passing between objects (in American school of object-oriented language)
• ML, 1973; polymorphic type system on top of Lisp, pioneering statically typed functional programming, algebraic data types, influenced subsequent functional programming languages
• Scheme, 1975; minimalist dialect of Lisp with lexical scoping, tail call optimization, first-class continuations, influenced subsequent languages/research
• Icon, 1977; structured programming successor to Snobol, uses goal-directed execution based on success or failure of expressions
• C++, 1980; C with Simula-like classes
• Ada, 1983; designed by US DoD-funded committee as standard language for military applications, statically typed, block structured, modular, synchronous message passing, object-oriented extensions in 1995
• Objective C, 1986; C with Smalltalk-like messaging, selected by Steve Jobs' NeXT systems, picked up by Apple when NeXT absorbed, key language for OS X and iOS
• Erlang, 1986; message-passing concurrency on functional programming base (actors), fault-tolerant/real-time systems, dynamic typing, virtual machine
• Self, 1986; dialect of Smalltalk (developed partly at Sun), first prototype-based object-oriented language (which influcenced JavaScript, Lua), used virtual machine with just-in-time compilation (JIT) which incluenced Java HotSpot
• Haskell, 1990; purely functional language with non-strict semantics (i.e., lazy evaluation) and strong static typing, widely used in functional programming research community
• Python, 1991; dynamically typed, multiparadigm language, increasing in use
• Ruby, 1993; dynamically typing, object-oriented, reflective/metaprogramming, internal domain-specfic languages, popularized by Ruby on Rails framework, influence on subsequent languages
• Lua, 1993; minimalistic language designed for embedding in any environment supporting standard C, dynamic typing, lexical scoping, first-class functions, garbage collection, tail recursion optimization, pervasive table/metatable data structure, facilities for prototype object-oriented programming, coroutines
• Java, 1995; class-based object-oriented programming, statically typed, virtual machine, version 8 has functional programming features (higher order functions, streams)
• Javascript, 1995; designed for embedding in web pages, dynamic typing, first-class functions, prototype-based object-oriented programming, became popular quickly before language design made clean
• F#, 2002; object-oriented ML descendent running on Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure
• Scala, 2003; hybrid functional and object-oriented language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine
• Clojure, 2007; Lisp dialect with concurrency (software transactional memory) that runs on Java Virtual Machine, immutable data structures
• Elixir, 2012-14; functional concurrent programming language, dynamic strong typing, Erlang actors, runs on Erlang Virtual Machine, influenced by Erlang, Ruby, and Clojure

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