| Contents | Up | Previous | Next | Web Site | Home Page |
In that late 1940's, a German engineer called Konrad Zuse sought a better way to program computers. He developed a system of symbols that could be used to solve problems step-by-step, called Plankalkul.
Alan Turing wrote a shorthand code for writing programs on the Mark I computer - but still pretty indecipherable to the untrained.
John Mauchly then developed Short Code which allowed equations to be entered using a special code.
Grace Hopper, inspired by this, became the first real advocate of High Level Languages - languages that are closer to language that humans might use to describe tasks.
One of the first widely-used languages was IBM Fortran, developed in the 1950's, working with mathematical data. The language ALGOL was developed in 1958, but was never as well accepted as Fortran.
COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was created in 1960, to serve mainly large businesses and governmental institutes. COBOL is still widely used in industry today, especially on large mainframe computers.
In 1964, BASIC (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was released, making programming accessible to many more people. Variants are still in wide use today - e.g. Microsoft Visual Basic.
In 1965, a language called PL/1 was introduced to be a 'cure-all' language. Being overly complex, it met with only limited success.
Simula I and 67 had little impact at the time, but introduced the early concepts of object-oriented programming that underpins most languages, including Java, used today.
In 1971, a Swiss professor called Niklaus Wirth introduced a teaching language called Pascal, which introduced important concepts in structured programming to reduce errors and increase readability.
C was created in 1972, intended as a lower-level language for writing operating systems for different computers, although its uptake has been far more universal than intended. On the surface, Java and C programs look similar - e.g. blocks are denoted by curly brackets.
Smalltalk, designed in the late 1970's, was the biggest breakthrough in many years, being both graphical and object-oriented. The concepts developed in Smalltalk contribute largely to modern languages such as C++ and Java.
ADA is used by the US Department of Defense, and was released in the early 1980's - it is large and very complex.
C++ was released in the mid-1980's to extend the popular C language to include object-oriented concepts.
Finally, Java was released in the mid-1990's to an enthusiastic audience
From this, you can clearly see that Java is only the latest in a whole history of languages. It may be that as Java is widely used, better ways of working will be discovered that fit how technology progresses. Java has the advantage in that it pre-empted a flourishing internet industry, so was in the right place at the right time, with a product that was solidly built and has thus stood the test of time.
(c) Copyright 2001-2 Arctan
Computer Ventures Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
If you have any issues regarding this on-line help, please contact the
author by clicking here.
This Page was last updated: 26 April 2002 15:54