Excerpts for understanding developments in Programming Languages

Last fifty years in computer science research has produced a series of fascinating innovation in programming languages. It started with Church and Turing's work on lamda calculus. In 1954 John Backus assembled a team to define and develop Fortran for the IBM 704 computer. Fortran was the first high level programming language to be put to broad use. Later John McCarthy rediscovered lamda calculus and created Lisp

In the late 1950s and 1960s, ALGOL was developed in order to allow mathematical algorithms to be more easily expressed, and even served as the operating system’s target language for some computers. COBOL (1960) and BASIC (1964) were both attempts to make programming syntax look more like English. In the 1970s, Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth, and C was created by Dennis Ritchie while he was working at Bell Laboratories.

The 1980s saw a rapid growth in interest in object-oriented programming. These languages were im- perative in style, but added features to support objects. The last two decades of the 20th century saw the development of a considerable number of such programming languages. Smalltalk-80, originally conceived by Alan Kay in 1969, was released in 1980 by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Drawing from concepts in another object-oriented language – Simula (which is considered to be the world’s first object-oriented programming language, developed in the late 1960s)Bjarne Stroustrup designed C++, an object-oriented language based on C. C++ was first implemented in 1985. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the notable im- perative languages drawing on object-oriented concepts were Perl, released by Larry Wall in 1987; Python, released by Guido van Rossum in 1990; PHP, released by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994; Java, first released by Sun Microsystems in 1994 and Ruby, released in 1995 by Yukihiro Matsumoto. Functional programming languages, especially purely functional ones, have largely been emphasized in academia rather than in commercial software development. However, prominent functional programming languages such as Scheme, Erlang, OCaml, and Haskell, have been used in industrial and commercial ap- plications by a wide variety of organizations. Functional programming also finds use in industry through domain-specific programming languages like R (statistics), Mathematica (symbolic math), J and K (financial analysis), and XSLT (XML). Widespread declarative domain specific languages like SQL and Lex/Yacc, use some elements of functional programming, especially in eschewing mutable values. Spreadsheets can also be viewed as functional programming languages. John Backus presented the FP programming language in his 1977 Turing Award lecture “Can Program- ming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and its Algebra of Programs”. He defines functional programs as being built up in a hierarchical way by means of “combining forms” that allow an “algebra of programs”; in modern language, this means that functional programs follow the principle of compositionality. Backus’s paper popularized research into functional programming, though it emphasized function-level programming rather than the lambda-calculus style which has come to be associated with functional programming. grew. By 1987, more than a dozen non-strict, purely functional programming languages existed. Of these, Miranda was the most widely used, but was not in the public domain. At the conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture (FPCA ’87) in Portland, Oregon, a meeting was held during which participants formed a strong consensus that a committee should be formed to define an open standard for such languages. The committee’s purpose was to consolidate the existing functional languages into a common one that would serve as a basis for future research in functional-language design. The first version of Haskell (”Haskell 1.0”) was defined in 1990. The committee’s efforts resulted in a series of language definitions. In late 1997, the series culminated in Haskell 98, intended to specify a stable, minimal, portable version of the language and an accompanying standard library for teaching, and as a base for future extensions. Following paper has a comparative study on various programming language implementations http://arxiv.org/pdf/1009.0305.