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EVOLUTION OF CODING

Mike Bedford reveals how the programming languages of the ’50s morphed into today’s most used languages.

GO, SWIFT AND RUST

TIMELINE

TIMELINE

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.
Image credit: www.rawpixel.com/image/8736409/computer-room-oak-ridge-1960s Photo: US Department of Energy, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/, UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council, available from www.chilton-computing.org.uk

They’re not in our family tree, as we were keen to promote clarity, and diagrams that look like the aftermath of an explosion in a spaghetti factory are rarely the easiest to read. However, we thought it would be interesting to look briefly at a few of the more recent languages that are increasing in popularity: Go, Swift and Rust.

FORTRAN 1957 Pretty much the first ever high-level language, FORTRAN continued to be the choice for scientific and mathematical computing for decades. That’s not to say it was without its drawbacks, though, its excessive use of GOTOs and hence its promotion of ‘spaghetti code’ surely being top of the list.

Smalltalk 1972 Yet another language that punched above its weight, Smalltalk, a beginner’s language developed at Xerox, might not have set the world on fire in its day, but its impact is clear to see if you’ve ever coded in Java. This language made big advances in the concept of the virtual machine.

Their ancestry is diverse, and that’s putting it mildly. In our look at today’s four most popular languages, we came across languages that were influenced by three predecessors at most. There are differences in opinion of which languages are direct predecessors, but Wikipedia lists Alef, C#, C++, Cyclone, Elm, Erlang, Haskell, Limbo, Newsqueak, OCaml, Ruby, Scheme, Standard ML and Swift as Rust’s immediate predecessors. Needless to say, Rust is described as a multi-paradigm language, an increasingly common theme, with five paradigms listed: concurrent, functional, generic, imperative and structured. And Rust isn’t alone. Swift boasts seven predecessors and eight paradigms, while for Go, 16 direct ancestors are listed.

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Linux Format
Summer 2023
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