A History of Computer Programming Languages
1. The High-Level Dawning
In the 1940s computer programs were cryptic and lengthy streams of low-level machine instructions. That changed in 1955 and through the 60s with the advent of Fortran, good for scientific calculations, and then Cobol for commercial data processing. These languages gave early programmers their first glimpse of the expressive power of abstracting away underlying details and using higher-level constructs to describe their needs.
2. The C Era
Around 1972 the C language was born and has probably had more impact on programming and language design than any other language to date. Many subsequent languages derived their syntax (appearance) from C and there are also a number of C dialects (such as C++ in 1980) which collectively still dominate the list of most popular programming languages today. With C one can create high-performing and low-memory-using applications so it's often used for writing other languages, operating systems, and small device controllers.
3. The Age of Java
In 1995 the Java language hit the scene, rapidly rose to popularity and is widely considered the most popular programming language in existence today. I put its success down to three reasons. Firstly, it was based on the C/C++ syntax so it was familiar looking. Secondly, it omitted a number of its predecessor's more complex language features greatly simplifying the language (although at the price of performance) but thus opening it up to a wider audience of programmers. And lastly due to the web.
Netscape Navigator, the first web browser, entered the market around the same time and allowed embedding of Java programs into web pages to extend their functionality and the two rode the tech boom together. A few years later Java made its way into the enterprise market (some say basically replacing COBOL) and the rest is history.
The historical perspective above is one way to look at it, but there are a few others. So now I'm going to slice languages across some other dimensions currently in play:
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