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May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
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May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
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General Readings on Languages History | Early compilers source | ||||
| Fortran | Algol & Simula | PL/1 | Basic | PL/360 | XPL | Algol-68 |
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Ordinarily technology changes fast. But programming languages are different: programming languages are not just technology, but what programmers think in. They're half technology and half religion. And so the median language, meaning whatever language the median programmer uses, moves as slow as an iceberg. |
A fruitful way to think about language development is to consider it a theory building like Peter Naur suggested about programming in general in his 1985 paper "Programming as Theory Building". In a way building a new language is a human way of solving complex problems. That means that complier construction in probably the most underappreciated paradigm of programming of large systems and that OO benefits are greatly overstated.
Progress in algorithmic languages was very uneven and contain several setbacks like Java. Currently this progress is usually associated with scripting languages. History of programming languages raises interesting general questions about language design. First let's reproduce several notable quotes:
There are several interesting questions in language design:
Why "worse is better" approach is so successful, why less powerful
and elegant languages can make it to mainstream and stay here ?
Why fashion rules in programming languages field ?
Please note that one thing is to read language manual and appreciate how good the concepts are, and another to bet your project on new unproved language without good debuggers, manuals and, what is very important, libraries. Debugger is especially important.
In this sense languages are much like cars. For many people car is the thing that they use get to work and shopping mall and they are not very interesting is engine inline or V-type and the use of fuzzy logic in the transmission. What they care is safety, reliability, mileage, insurance and the size of trunk. In this sense "Worse is better" is very true. I already mentioned the importance of the debugger. The other important criteria is quality and availability of libraries. Actually libraries are what make 80% of the usability of the language, moreover in a sense libraries are more important than the language...
A popular belief that scripting is "unsafe" or "second rate" or "prototype" solution is completely wrong. If a project had died than it does not matter what was the implementation language, so for any successful project and tough schedules scripting language (especially in dual scripting language+C combination, for example TCL+C) is an optimal blend that for a large class of tasks. Such an approach helps to separate architectural decisions from implementation details much better that any OO model does.
Moreover even for tasks that handle a fair amount of computations and data (computationally intensive tasks) such languages as Python and Perl are often (but not always !) competitive with C++, C# and, especially, Java.
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We've come a long way from computers programmed with wires and punch cards. Maybe not as far as some would like, though. Here are the innovations in programming.
ca. 1946
Konrad Zuse , a German engineer working alone while hiding out in the Bavarian Alps, develops Plankalkul. He applies the language to, among other things, chess.
1949
Short Code , the first computer language actually used on an electronic computing device, appears. It is, however, a "hand-compiled" language.
1951
Grace Hopper , working for Remington Rand, begins design work on the first widely known compiler, named A-0. When the language is released by Rand in 1957, it is called MATH-MATIC.
1952
Alick E. Glennie , in his spare time at the University of Manchester, devises a programming system called AUTOCODE, a rudimentary compiler.
1957
FORTRAN --mathematical FORmula TRANslating system--appears. Heading the team is John Backus, who goes on to contribute to the development of ALGOL and the well-known syntax-specification system known as BNF.
1958
FORTRAN II appears, able to handle subroutines and links to assembly language. John McCarthy at M.I.T. begins work on LISP--LISt Processing.
The original specification for ALGOL appears. The specific ation does not describe how data will be input or output; that is left to the individual implementations.
1959
LISP 1.5 appears. COBOL is created by the Conference on Data Systems and Languages (CODASYL).
1960
ALGOL 60 , the first block-structured language, appears. This is the root of the family tree that will ultimately produce the likes of Pascal. ALGOL goes on to become the most popular language in Europe in the mid- to late-1960s.
Sometime in the early 1960s , Kenneth Iverson begins work on the language that will become APL--A Programming Language. It uses a specialized character set that, for proper use, requires APL-compatible I/O devices.
1962
APL is documented in Iverson's book, A Pro gramming Language .
FORTRAN IV appears.
Work begins on the sure-fire winner of the "clever acronym" award, SNOBOL--StriNg-Oriented symBOlic Language. It will spawn other clever acronyms: FASBOL, a SNOBOL compiler (in 1971), and SPITBOL--SPeedy ImplemenTation of snoBOL--also in 1971.
1963
ALGOL 60 is revised.
Work begins on PL/1.
1964
APL\360 is implemented.
At Dartmouth University , professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz invent BASIC. The first implementation is a compiler. The first BASIC program runs at about 4:00 a.m. on May 1, 1964.
PL/1 is released.
1965
SNOBOL3 appears.
1966
FORTRAN 66 appears.
LISP 2 appears.
Work begins on LOGO at Bolt, Beranek, & Newman. The team is headed by Wally Fuerzeig and includes Seymour Papert. LOGO is best known for its "turtle graphics."
1967
SNOBOL4 , a much-enhanced SNOBOL, appears.
1968
ALGOL 68 , a monster compared to ALGOL 60, appears. Some members of the specifications committee--including C.A.R. Hoare and Niklaus Wirth--protest its approval. ALGOL 68 proves difficult to implement.
ALTRAN , a FORTRAN variant, appears.
COBOL is officially defined by ANSI.
Niklaus Wirth begins work on Pascal.
1969
500 people attend an APL conference at IBM's headquarters in Armonk, New York. The demands for APL's distribution are so great that the event is later referred to as "The March on Armonk."
1970
Sometime in the early 1970s , Charles Moore writes the first significant programs in his new language, Forth.
Work on Prolog begins about this time.
Also sometime in the early 1970s , work on Smalltalk begins at Xerox PARC, led by Alan Kay. Early versions will include Smalltalk-72, Smalltalk-74, and Smalltalk-76.
An implementation of Pascal appears on a CDC 6000-series computer.
Icon , a descendant of SNOBOL4, appears.
1972
The manuscript for Konrad Zuse's Plankalkul (see 1946) is finally published.
Denni s Ritchie produces C. The definitive reference manual for it will not appear until 1974.
The first implementation of Prolog -- by Alain Colmerauer and Phillip Roussel -- appears.
1974
Another ANSI specification for COBOL appears.
1975
Tiny BASIC by Bob Albrecht and Dennis Allison (implementation by Dick Whipple and John Arnold) runs on a microcomputer in 2 KB of RAM. A 4-KB machine is sizable, which left 2 KB available for the program.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen write a version of BASIC that they sell to MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) on a per-copy royalty basis. MITS is producing the Altair, an 8080-based microcomputer.
Scheme , a LISP dialect by G.L. Steele and G.J. Sussman, appears.
Pascal User Manual and Report , by Jensen and Wirth, is published. Still considered by many to be the definitive reference on Pascal.
B.W. Kerninghan describes RATFOR--RATional FORTRAN. It is a preprocessor that allows C-like control structures in FORTRAN. RATFOR is used in Kernighan and Plauger's "Software Tools," which appears in 1976.
1976
Design System Language , considered to be a forerunner of PostScript, appears.
1977
The ANSI standard for MUMPS -- Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System -- appears. Used originally to handle medical records, MUMPS recognizes only a string data-type. Later renamed M.
The design competition that will produce Ada begins. Honeywell Bull's team, led by Jean Ichbiah, will win the competition.
Kim Harris and others set up FIG, the FORTH interest group. They develop FIG-FORTH, which they sell for around $20.
Sometime in the late 1970s , Kenneth Bowles produces UCSD Pascal, which makes Pascal available on PDP-11 and Z80-based computers.
Niklaus Wirth begins work on Modula, forerunner of Modula-2 and successor to Pascal.
1978
AWK -- a text-processing language named after the designers, Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan -- appears.
The ANSI standard for FORTRAN 77 appears.
1980
Smalltalk-80 appears.
Modula-2 appears.
Franz LISP appears.
Bjarne Stroustrup develops a set of languages -- collectively referred to as "C With Classes" -- that serve as the breeding ground for C++.
1981
Effort begins on a common dialect of LISP, referred to as Common LISP.
Japan begins the Fifth Generation Computer System project. The primary language is Prolog.
1982
ISO Pascal appears.
PostScript appears.
1983
Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation by Goldberg et al is published.
Ada appears . Its name comes from Lady Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of the English poet Byron. She has been called the first computer programmer because of her work on Charles Babbage's analytical engine. In 1983, the Department of Defense directs that all new "mission-critical" applications be written in Ada.
In late 1983 and early 1984, Microsoft and Digital Research both release the first C compilers for microcomputers.
In July , the first implementation of C++ appears. The name is coined by Rick Mascitti.
In November , Borland's Turbo Pascal hits the scene like a nuclear blast, thanks to an advertisement in BYTE magazine.
1984
A reference manual for APL2 appears. APL2 is an extension of APL that permits nested arrays.
1985
Forth controls the submersible sled that locates the wreck of the Titanic.
Vanilla SNOBOL4 for microcomputers is released.
Methods , a line-oriented Smalltalk for PCs, is introduced.
1986
Smalltalk/V appears--the first widely av ailable version of Smalltalk for microcomputers.
Apple releases Object Pascal for the Mac.
Borland releases Turbo Prolog.
Charles Duff releases Actor, an object-oriented language for developing Microsoft Windows applications.
Eiffel , another object-oriented language, appears.
C++ appears.
1987
Turbo Pascal version 4.0 is released.
1988
The specification for CLOS -- Common LISP Object System -- is published.
Niklaus Wirth finishes Oberon, his follow-up to Modula-2.
1989
The ANSI C specification is published.
C++ 2.0 arrives in the form of a draft reference manu al. The 2.0 version adds features such as multiple inheritance and pointers to members.
1990
C++ 2.1 , detailed in Annotated C++ Reference Manual by B. Stroustrup et al, is published. This adds templates and exception-handling features.
FORTRAN 90 includes such new elements as case statements and derived types.
Kenneth Iverson and Roger Hui present J at the APL90 conference.
1991
Visual Basic wins BYTE's Best of Show award at Spring COMDEX.
1992
Dylan -- named for Dylan Thomas -- an object-oriented language resembling Scheme, is released by Apple.
1993
ANSI releases the X3J4.1 technical report -- the first-draft proposal for (gulp) object-oriented COBOL. The standard is expected to be finalized in 1997.
1994
Microsoft incorporates Visual Basic for Applications into Excel.
1995
In February , ISO accepts the 1995 revision of the Ada language. Called Ada 95, it includes OOP features and support for real-time systems.
1996
Anticipated release of first ANSI C++ standard .
March 20, 2007 (MSNBC.com)
John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82.
Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Ore., according to IBM Corp., where he spent his career.
Prior to Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" — programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a "high-level" programming language because it abstracted that work — it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.
The breakthrough earned Backus the 1977 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the industry's highest accolades. The citation praised Backus' "profound, influential, and lasting contributions."
Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975 and got the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering.
"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979. "I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."
John Warner Backus was born in Wilmington, Del., in 1924. His father was a chemist who became a stockbroker. Backus had what he would later describe as a "checkered educational career" in prep school and the University of Virginia, which he left after six months. After being drafted into the Army, Backus studied medicine but dropped it when he found radio engineering more compelling.
Backus finally found his calling in math, and he pursued a master's degree at Columbia University in New York. Shortly before graduating, Backus toured the IBM offices in midtown Manhattan and came across the company's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, an early computer stuffed with 13,000 vacuum tubes. Backus met one of the machine's inventors, Rex Seeber — who "gave me a little homemade test and hired me on the spot," Backus recalled in 1979.
Backus' early work at IBM included computing lunar positions on the balky, bulky computers that were state of the art in the 1950s. But he tired of hand-coding the hardware, and in 1954 he got his bosses to let him assemble a team that could design an easier system.
The result, Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20.
It showed skeptics that machines could run just as efficiently without hand-coding. A wide range of programming languages and software approaches proliferated, although Fortran also evolved over the years and remains in use.
Backus remained with IBM until his retirement in 1991. Among his other important contributions was a method for describing the particular grammar of computer languages. The system is known as Backus-Naur Form.
© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The following exchange comes from a transcript given at the 1978 conference which the book documents:
CHEATHAM: The next question is from Bernie Galler of the University of Michigan, and he asks: "BNF is sometimes pronounced Backus-Naur-Form and sometimes Backus-Normal- Form. What was the original intention?
NAUR: I don't know where BNF came from in the first place. I don't know -- surely BNF originally meant Backus Normal Form. I don't know who suggested it. Perhaps Ingerman. [This is denied by Peter Z. Ingerman.] I don't know.
CHEATHAM: It was a suggestion that Peter Ingerman proposed then?
NAUR: ... Then the suggestion to change that I think was made by Don Knuth in a letter to the Communications of the ACM, and the justification -- well, he has the justification there. I think I made reference to it, so there you'll find whatever justification was originally made. That's all I would like to say.
A number of readers let us know of the passing of John W. Backus, who assembled a team to develop FORTRAN at IBM in the 1950s. It was the first widely used high-level language. Backus later worked on a "function-level" programming language, FP, which was described in his Turing Award lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" and is viewed as Backus's apology for creating FORTRAN. He received the 1977 ACM Turing Award "for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages."Be afraid, be very afraid(Score:5, Insightful)
by vivaoporto (1064484) on Tuesday March 20, @05:48AM (#18411881)
(http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html)With both the lack of interest and the distortion of the original goal, Computer Science as we know may be dying with the elders. Computer Science originally had nothing to do with computers (as in personal computer) per se, but with the science of computation, optimal algorithms for pure math problems, etc. Actually, it was nothing but a branch of Math. The way computer science is being dealt with nowadays, with disdain, lack of interest and with people thinking about it as a tool to put another "screw tighter" professional in the market, soon we may run out of real breakthroughs like the ones those genius created to pave the yellow brick road we run over nowadays.rest in peace(Score:5, Informative)
by dario_moreno (263767) on Tuesday March 20, @06:15AM (#18411991)
(http://www.mastermodelisation.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday April 03, @04:23PM)Maybe it's because I was breastfed with BASIC from a very young age, but when I was forced to learn FORTRAN to work on legacy code I discovered after some initial, computer science taught disgust, that it was really the best way to express myself in code, better than with anything else, and I owe my present university position to FORTRAN because it made me so productive. I guess it was because the language was conceived by engineer, scientists oriented types, and not by formal logic adepts or grammar nazis. I still teach FORTRAN to this day, using F90/F95 in all its power, and MATLAB-like exposed students tend to enjoy it because they can develop simple and efficient numerical codes much faster than with anything else; some of them found positions thanks to it. The trick is to use FORTRAN for what it's for (numerical arrays, heavy linear algebra, easily parallelizable scientific computing) and not strings or files manipulation, linked lists (LISP) , graphics or system : for that there is C(++), and tons of libraries. If the code grows larger than 10 000 lines, very strong discipline is necessary, and that's where true OO can be pertinent. In scientific code FORTRAN tends to be 20% faster than the best possible C++ implementation because the grammar is so simple that compilers tend to understand better the code and can vectorize or optimize it much farther than C ; and there is much less overhead than with C++ because the objects are simpler to manipulate. Major code used in the industry (Star-CD, Gaussian for instance) is still written in FORTRAN for those (and legacy) reasons.Re:rest in peace(Score:4, Insightful)
by Wormholio (729552) on Tuesday March 20, @08:04AM (#18412433)I too still teach my students (in physics and astronomy) to use Fortran, for many of the reasons listed above. While it may also be useful for them to go on to learn other languages, their primary focus is on the physics problems they need to solve and the numerical algorithms needed to help them do that. Fortran makes it easy for them to get started and then focus on the calculations, not on grammar or philosophy.
Fortran has been criticized because you can write "spaghetti code" or other crap, while other languages supposedly protect you from the mistakes you can make in Fortran. But you can write crappy code in any language (including "spaghetti classes"). I teach my students to write with good style. They know their code has to be clearly understandable not just to the machine but also to someone else who is familiar with the goal of the code but not the details. Trying to enforce good style through grammar is misguided at best, just as it is in writing in general. Developing good style is a personal, ongoing process for writing anything, including good code.
BNF is an acronym for "Backus Naur Form". John Backus and Peter Naur introduced for the first time a formal notation to describe the syntax of a given language (This was for the description of the ALGOL 60 programming language, see [Naur 60]). To be precise, most of BNF was introduced by Backus in a report presented at an earlier UNESCO conference on ALGOL 58. Few read the report, but when Peter Naur read it he was surprised at some of the differences he found between his and Backus's interpretation of ALGOL 58. He decided that for the successor to ALGOL, all participants of the first design had come to recognize some weaknesses, should be given in a similar form so that all participants should be aware of what they were agreeing to. He made a few modificiations that are almost universally used and drew up on his own the BNF for ALGOL 60 at the meeting where it was designed. Depending on how you attribute presenting it to the world, it was either by Backus in 59 or Naur in 60. (For more details on this period of programming languages history, see the introduction to Backus's Turing award article in Communications of the ACM, Vol. 21, No. 8, august 1978. This note was suggested by William B. Clodius from Los Alamos Natl. Lab).
Ralph Griswold died two weeks ago. He created several programming languages, most notably Snobol (in the 60s) and Icon (in the 70s) — both outstandingly innovative, integral, and efficacious in their areas. Despite the abundance of scripting and other languages today, Snobol and Icon are still unsurpassed in many respects, both as elegance of design and as practicality.
See also Ralph Griswold 1934-2006 and Griswold Memorial Endowment
Ralph E. Griswold died in Tucson on October 4, 2006, of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was Regents Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona.Griswold was born in Modesto, California, in 1934. He was an award winner in the 1952 Westinghouse National Science Talent Search and went on to attend Stanford University, culminating in a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1962.
Griswold joined the staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, and rose to become head of Programming Research and Development. In 1971, he came to the University of Arizona to found the Department of Computer Science, and he served as department head through 1981. His insistence on high standards brought the department recognition and respect. In recognition of his work the university granted him the breastle of Regents Professor in 1990.
While at Bell Labs, Griswold led the design and implementation of the groundbreaking SNOBOL4 programming language with its emphasis on string manipulation and high-level data structures. At Arizona, he developed the Icon programming language, a high-level language whose influence can be seen in Python and other recent languages.
Griswold authored numerous books and articles about computer science. After retiring in 1997, his interests turned to weaving. While researching mathematical aspects of weaving design he collected and digitized a large library of weaving documents and maintained a public website. He published technical monographs and weaving designs that inspired the work of others, and he remained active until his final week.
-----Gregg Townsend Staff Scientist The University of Arizona
2. There was a distinction between the publication language and the implementation language (those probably aren't the right terms). Among other things, it got around differences such as whether to use decimal points or commas in numeric constants.
3. Designed by a committee, rather than a private company or government agency.
4. Archetype of the so-called "Algol-like languages," examples of which are (were?) Pascal, PL./I, Algol68, Ada, C, and Java. (The term Algol-like languages is hardly used any more, since we have few examples of contemporary non-Algol-like languages.)
However, as someone who actually programmed in it (on a Univac 1108 in 1972 or 1973), I can say that Algol60 was extremely difficult to use for anything real, since it lacked string processing, data structures, adequate control flow constructs, and separate compilation. (Or so I recall... it's been a while since I've read the Report.)