From Slashdot: “There are more than 2,500 documented programming languages and O’Reilly has produced a poster called History of Programming Languages, which plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline.“
The History of Programming Languages
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Really interesting and…
Long Live Fortran!
(Yes, I like it… A LOT!)
Go to http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/ and you can see a program that prints out the words to the “99 Bottles of Beer” song written in 621 different programming languages. Pretty interesting to see all the different ways to do the same things.
As a theoretical chemist, I agree, long live Fortran 95!
FORTRAN 77, however, can die the death it assuredly deserves. I’ve spent too much time stumbling through fixed-format loops and COMMON blocks to like that language.
Fortran 95 R0X0Rz!!!
Having written thousands of Fortran 95 code for astrophysical simulations a few years ago on a DEC Alpha, I really came to appreciate it’s clean syntax and speed. For those kinds of calculations, it’s really the best tool. I wonder why it really hasn’t caught up in other areas, because it’s not that hard of a language, and it’s pretty flexible and powerful. It really fixes everything that’s wrong about Fortran 77.
long live write (*,*)!!!
But what is this ‘OO Forth’ they speak of? There have been loads of different implementations of various differing OOP models in Forth. It’s not so cut-and-dried as standardised languages. Methinks thier research might be a little sketchy.
I would be interested in a history of assembly and machine languages. An arrow chart of CPUs? Cool!
Hehe. I’m certain we all remember that. I believe that lives on in Delphi. Anyway any remember the Apple Pascal Poster?
This? http://homepage.mac.com/lucaswagner/raskin/
I am too young to have known about this but it is pretty cool. Colours are a bit ghastly 😉
Yup. That’s the one. Thought of doing it in Illustrator, and making it available. Only two things. Copyright, and getting a hold of one (or at least good pictures of one).
I’m with you
C Sucks..there are better language that gives you work done without all those hicups!
At a CFDer, one vote for C++ and one vote against FORTRAN. Those legacy code!
“C Sucks..there are better language that gives you work done without all those hicups!”
Hicups, at least spell it right if you are going to insult C…
If you mean the difficulties of managing your own memory than say so, you’d be right that managing one’s own memory *can* be a drawback.
Long live C!
http://www.levenez.com/lang/
http://people.ku.edu/~nkinners/LangList/Extras/langlist.htm
I was living under the impression that ADA (as in “Ada Lovelace”) was the first programming language ever ? I could be wrong , or it may be that O’Reilly never printed an ADA Cookbook .
Still faster and easier than anything out there for serious scientific calculations. Sure, you can’t write a decent GUI with it or interface routine, but you’ve got a whole lot of other languages for that. You DON’T have them for heavy duty calculations…
Clearly the best programming language ever created is COW: http://www.bigzaphod.org/cow/ I say this not because I created it… er… actually, that is why I say this…
Because multiple inheritance rocks
Wow, I think I’ll ditch Ruby and Python straight away! Long live COW!!!
Any plans to port it to .Net?
Anyone here that have heard of Intercal.
It has outstanding features, like GO FROM instead of GO TO and the PLEASE prefix needed on random lines.
The presistance of FORTRAN is quite impressive. That language has no exclusive feature, except that what it does, it does it right. The built-in math fonctions allows better optimisations than a library based language ( like C ).
Fortran is now a DSL ( Domain Specific Language ) after being the father of all imperative PLs.
seems to me that what makes a language good or not is a balance between:
* how much is assumed by the computer/compiler/interpreter
* how much onus is on the programmer
* the avoidance of obvious design errors
now this may seem obvious but what is interesting is that there are more than one sweet spots in this space – hence there is a place for assembler, there is a place for C, there is a place for python, lisp and prolog….
and bad languages fail to keep the balance – the exchange between the programmer and the computer is not fair – a bad language puts onus on the developer without reward.
HA HA HA HA…oh, that is funny. no Ada was not the first programming language. the first computers that had a high level language were not powerful enough to be able to support Ada with all its safeness.
Ada was created by the DoD and is still used by the Airforce in many applications. the language is not that bad, but a lot of programmers hate it because you have to do things the Ada way or not at all. The reason for this is because Ada is almost impossible to write in such a way as to allow for Buffer overflows and other memory issues that can cause a crash. if MS decided to write windows in Ada, their security holes would not be around.
No immediate plans to port to .NET, but I wouldn’t rule it out. Of course it could be difficult… COW is so far more advanced and powerful than .NET that .NET may not have an advanced enough base to properly integrate with COW…
I was living under the impression that ADA (as in “Ada Lovelace”) was the first programming language ever ?
No, ADA was created for the DoD when they wanted to have a secure language. One of the main influences of must be Modula-2, a successor of Pascal, thus it is newer than Modula.
You probably got confused by the fact that Ada Lovelace, who was an assistant to Charles Babagge in the 18th century, is considered as the first programmer.
ADA is in fact named after the first programmer, but that doesn’t make it the oldest programming language.
And obviously it is not some kind of ugly acronym like COBOL, it is just plain Ada, not all-capitalized
Btw, worth noting that even if FORTRAN has been around for ages, there near no similarities beetween current fortran and ole days fortran.
… because I can run pretty well f77 routines under f95.
Once I had to run a transliterated f66 in f90 and the compiler just complained a bit, but ran it all the same.
Thankfully there are a few people who know how to spell Ada, its a name not an TLA. That got me thinking, has FORTRAN been around long enough and maintained sufficient popularity to be elevated to being spelt Fortran much like Radar and Laser are no longer uncapitalized?
It looks like this poster (http://www.levenez.com/lang/history.html#04) is more correct regarding Simula (the first object oriented language).
“And so I tried to take the strength of Simula in terms of type system and object-oriented programming and object-oriented design and marry it with the strengths of C ”
http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/alumni/win96/stroustrup.html