Evolution of Computer Programming Languages

Introduction

Computer Programming languages has been around from last 50 years and there is huge research has been done on programming languages. Computer programming languages categorized based on the development methods and the type of application they are used to build.

Procedure oriented languages

Computer Programming Language are mainly categorized as low level language and high level language. At the very early stage of computers there are low level languages such as machine language and assembly languages, they are called low level as they are purely written in binary 0’s and 1’s or the instruction set understand by the hardware devices. These languages have limited functionality and they are hard to understand. Then there is demand to create the programming languages understand by human and computer, The researchers created many languages like basic, pascal, B these languages are using compilers or interpreters to transfer the code into machine readable form. These languages are used for many general purpose applications but are not popular due to their complexity, In 1970’s C language emerges as the first full featured high level language and it is called mother of all languages the new languages evolved after C are based on it, C language is the first powerful and easy to use language and it has gain huge popularity.

Object oriented languages

After 1980's there is huge demand of creating data oriented application due to this procedure oriented languages are failed to meet these expectation. The new software development method object oriented language evolved in that duration and the new languages created after that are following the rules defined in object oriented languages, The languages like C++ (object oriented version of C language) got a popularity as it is similar to C. It fails to claim as a pure object oriented language as it contains most of the feature from C. Then first fully object oriented language Java developed by Sun Microsystems has emerged and 1990’s it is popular in software industry and until today it is first choice in development of applications.

Database languages

Databases are the special kind of software used to store data in tabular format. SQL (Structured query language) is used to work on the database. All the database software Oracle, Microsft Sql Server, MySql has inbuilt support for SQL.

Web application languages

After 1990’s there is boom in internet based application and it leads to requirement of the languages which supports these web applications. The web application runs in browser, HTML is the first and only language used for creating a web applications. HTML is static in nature end user not able to interact with the application to overcome this there are different web technologies evolved PHP, ASP.NET, Java Servlet, Ruby on Rails. These technologies using the to create a dynamic web application with the help of HTML. The languages used in these technologies are run on servers. There was need of language to run in browser, Javascript was became the de facto as it is most powerful and widely used web programming language runs in web browsers.

Data Science application languages

After 2000 the software industry sees a potential in Data Analytics and Data Science applications and all previous languages failed to meet the expectation, Python language make its space in analytics as it contains most of the statistical library to perform analytical operations on the data, then R is also getting some success in Data Analytics.

Language popularity chart stackoverflow.com

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