Programming languages are an essential part of our lives and our society today. In about a mere 180 years, they evolved from complicated machine codes to languages readable to humans and powerful tools running the software and hardware of the 21st century.
Today, we want to travel back in time and explore the history of these programming languages, how they came to be, and how they changed throughout the years.
To talk about the invention of programming languages, we have to go back to Victorian England, to 1843. This was the year when Ada Lovelace, mathematician and pioneer of computing, proposed an algorithm for how Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine could compute the Bernoulli sequence of numbers. We refer to this algorithm since then as the world’s very first computer code, which lay the foundation for all programming languages.
The next significant milestone took place in the 1940s when the first modern electrically powered computers emerged. Back in those days, due to the limited speed and memory of the computers, programmers had to use so-called Assembly Languages, which were a type of low-level programming language that simplified the language of machine code.
At the beginning of the 50s, the first functioning programming languages designed to communicate instructions to a computer started to appear. The first language developed for electronic computers was invented by John Mauchly in 1949 and was called Short Code. In 1952, Alick Glennie created Autocode, the first autocode and its compiler to increase comprehensibility in the programming of Mark1 machines, many consider this the first compiled language. In 1957, John Backus created FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) for high-level scientific, mathematical, and statistical computations. Fun fact: recent revisions of this programming language are still used today by none other than the world’s fastest supercomputers.
The ’60s and ’70s saw great milestones in the field of programming. Not only did it experience a significant bloom, and the use of structured programming emerged as a best practice. Some of the most notable languages developed during this period were Pascal and C, but we also have to mention SQL, which is used to this day to view and change data stored in databases.
In the ‘80s, new languages were introduced based on these previous ones, C++, for example, was created by Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of C.
The beginning of the Internet age in the mid-90s brought rapid growth and the emergence of functional and scripting languages.
More recently, we’ve seen a flowering of languages being developed following the philosophy of open-source. Great examples of this are Ruby and #Scala. Go, or #Golang was created in 2009 by employees of Google, Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson with useful characteristics of other programming languages in mind to improve productivity and enable programmers to create software faster. It was also open-sourced not long after.
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