Rundown On Programming Languages
July 6th, 2007 by Stephen Cronin (702 views)I stumbled across the following rundown on programming languages by superpogi. It is by no means complete, lacking more recent languages, such as C#, Python, Ruby etc, but it does present some fascinating history (okay I have no life!) of some of the major languages, including:
C/C++, Java, PHP, Perl, Cobol, Pascal, Fortran, Basic / Visual Basic and LISP
I’ve been a part-time programmer on and off, since first encountering Basic on a Texas Instruments computer in the late 1980s. I’ve encountered quite a few of the languages on the list, but for the most part, I haven’t known the history of these languages, so it’s interesting reading for me.
Wikipedia has a wealth of information about programming languages and has several lists of languages. However, they are all very large - I enjoyed superpogi’s article, because it only includes the ‘major’ languages.
I’m normally too busy for nostalgia, but this made me stop and think!
These days, I use PHP and Javascript in my web development work and also teach Visual Basic for Applications. At uni in the early 1990s, we started with Modula2, used Prolog for AI, before moving on to C. One of my favourite programming languages was Clipper, which I used in the mid-90s.
Are there any languages you feel nostalgic about?
Tags: programming languages
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Interesting. It was fun to read the history of languages. I started to look through the history on wikipedia. Appartently one of the first proponents of Perl was convicted of a computer related felony http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randal_L._Schwartz
Hi Austin (I’m just going to call you that for short), I didn’t know that.
If you have a background in programming like I have, it is quite interesting. With computers we are always looking forward, to the newest thing. It’s not often we stop and look backwards.
The difference is while most people can appreciate looking back at 20MB hard drives, not many appreciate looking back at the old programming languages.