EVOLUTION OF CODING
Mike Bedford reveals how the programming languages of the ’50s morphed into today’s most used languages.
It might seem surprising that today’s commonly used languages can trace their ancestry back to the ’50s or ’60s, given how much computers have changed since then.
Classic languages might make you think dead languages, but nothing could be further from the truth. Linux Format has C been revisiting classic languages in recent issues, so to wrap up this odyssey, we trace how these various languages have influenced others over the decades and how today’s latest and greatest owe a debt of gratitude to a whole sequence of languages dating back more than 60 years.
Many of the languages we discuss will be familiar names but some may not. Famous or not, though, they’ve all played their part in bringing us the languages that make today’s coding experience so much more rewarding and productive. What’s more, they’ve probably played no small part in preventing you from pulling your hair out in frustration when your code refuses to behave itself.
If you’ve ever researched your family history, you’ll probably have complied a family tree, and with good reason – the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” has never been more appropriate. So, we’re going to take a leaf out of the genealogists’ book, and present the key relationships between languages as something we like to think of as a family tree. And to put the meat on the bare bones, we’re going to look, in more detail, at several branches of that tree. The family tree shows which languages influenced which others, but it’s only approximately chronological, so we’re also providing a timeline, across the bottom of the whole article, to put some of the more significant languages into a historical context.
Ancient history
The first branch of the family tree covers just three years, from 1957 to 1960. It takes us from FORTRAN to ALGOL-60 via just one intermediary, the largely experimental ALGOL-58. We’re looking at it separately, though, because it was so fundamental in introducing a new programming paradigm – one that’s now taken for granted and is embodied in pretty much all of today’s most popular languages.