CSci 555: Functional Programming
Spring 2016

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.

• 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 (instructor studied this language while working in the military aerospace industry 1980-83)
• 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 influenced JavaScript, Lua), used virtual machine with just-in-time compilation (JIT) which influenced Java HotSpot
• Perl, 1987; dynamic programming language originally focused on providing powerful text-processing facilities based around regular expressions
• 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-specific 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); developed by Sun Microsystems, now Oracle
• 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
• PHP, 1995; server-side scripting language for dynamic web applications
• OCaml (originally Objective Caml), 1996; a dialect of ML that adds object-oriented constructs, focusing on performance and practical use

• C#, 2001; class-based object-oriented programming, statically typed, mostly imperative, language that runs on Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure (in some sense, Microsoft's response to Sun's Java)
• F#, 2002; OCaml re-envisioned for Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure (.Net)
• Scala, 2003; hybrid functional and object-oriented language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine
• Groovy, 2003; dynamically typed 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, 2014 (for 1.0 release); functional concurrent programming language, dynamic strong typing, metaprogramming, protocols, Erlang actors, runs on Erlang Virtual Machine, influenced by Erlang, Ruby, and Clojure
• Swift, 2014; Apple's replacement for Objective C that incorporates contemporary language concepts and focuses on program safety; "Objective C without the C"
• Rust, 2015 (for 1.0 release); systems programming language that incorporates contemporary language concepts and focuses on safety and performance, meant to replace C and C++
• Idris, 2016 (for 1.0 release); Haskell-like functional language with dependent types, incorporating ideas from proof assistants.
• Other interesting languages: Julia, miniKanren, etc.

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