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This blog will focus on computer science and statistics.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

History of Computer Science: Programming Language

Almost every day, I can hear one or two of my classmates complain how hard the java is, and admire how amazing it is. I was wondering how many programing languages like java are there in the world, and none could tell a specific number as the answer since every minute there may be a new one will be created. However, we can clearly tell when the languages were built.

The first three still widespread used programming languages-FORTRAN, LISP, and COBOL are designed in the 1950s. Moreover, the two key of language innovations was featured as nested block structure and lexical scoping.
The period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s brought a major flowing of programming languages. [1] C and SQL were developed during this period. However, at that time, designers were keeping trying on establishing fundamental paradigms.

Time went to 1980s, rather than inventing new paradigms, relative consolidation in imperative language took the main stage, and people start to focus on the large scale systems. C++, Common Lisp, and Matlab were developed during this period.
The rapid growth of internet in 1990s provided a huge opportunity for new language to be adopted. Visual Basic, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, and PHP showed their appearance in the world. In particular, the Java rose to popularity. The current trends of programming language are integration with data bases, increased emphasis on mobility, and increasing support for functional programming in mainstream languages used commercially. [2]

 
Reference:  [1] [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages

2 comments:

  1. Hi Wenjing,
    Java is definitely one of the most popular object oriented programming languages today. And as you said, many new programming languages are being created every day. That is the beauty of computer science. In the post you gave us the timeline of programming languages, which is nice but there are some grammatical/sentence formation issues. I would suggest you to use criterion. It really helps to catch all the grammatical errors that normal text editors cannot. Good Luck!

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  2. Wenjing,
    You post is very good. It clearly tells readers the history of programming languages.
    As one important part of computer science, programming languages have underwent great changes. From boring machine language(0 and 1) to OOP(object oriented programming), all them represent the scientific technology at that time. Parallel computing is becoming hotter and hotter. In the foreseeable future, new programming language which can be suitable for parallel or multi-core will appear.

    I like the style of your article. It is informative and easy to understand.

    Keep blogging!

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