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Filio Force company specialists share the second part of the article about the history and development of programming languages. The previous part was about the first programmers, the birth of structured and object-oriented programming, and the first programming languages.
In the early 1980s, Danish programmer Bjorn Straustrup decided to improve the C language and added a number of features to it. This is how C++ appeared, combining features of object-oriented and system programming languages. Straustrup introduced into C the possibility to work with objects and classes, strict type checking, default arguments, etc. The first versions of the new language were called C classes, and the name C++ began to be used in 1985 with the release of the next version. By that time the possibilities of the language had expanded even more. C++ is still relevant, actively used and developed.
Another important milestone was the appearance of the object-oriented language Ada, named in honour of Ada Lyvles, whom we told you about in the first part of our historical material. The language was developed at the request of the US Department of Defence. The language was based on Pascal and Algol. Ada was created for military and related tasks, primarily for ship and aircraft control systems. Now the language is used for air traffic control in some countries, as well as space projects.
During this era, the active use of modules – large units of code organisation – began. This allowed simplifying the process of testing and searching for errors. Besides Ada, Oberon, Pascal, Haskell and others were modular.
Languages designed for text processing have evolved, notably Pearl, Python and Ruby. For example, Pearl, developed for text editing, is now used for a wide variety of purposes, from system administration to database work. Python is now a universal programming language, widely known and easy to use. Ruby is still relevant and used for web applications.
Another trend of the late 1980s-early 1990s is the development of virtual languages. In them, a programme is created by manipulating graphical objects instead of writing code. The first such languages were Visual Basic, Delphi and C++ Builder. Managers of Filio Force it company gave a modern example – it is Scratch oriented at children and teenagers audience
In the early 1990s, the Internet began to develop rapidly, and accordingly, tools for creating websites and applications were needed. At first, Pearl and HTML were actively used for this purpose. In 1995, PHP, a C-like language for web development, was released. In the same year, the first version of the popular JavaScript language was released, which is used for dynamic web development
In the 1990s, James Gosling released one of the most popular languages of our days – Java. It is now often used to create Android apps and web services
Unlike the early languages, which were characterised by limited functionality and were poorly distributed, the most popular languages of the 1980s and 1990s were much more accessible and were used for a wide range of tasks. Infrastructures, tutorials, manuals, libraries, and frameworks formed around them. Programming became a more mainstream activity.
The first hit of the new millennium is C#, developed at Microsoft by Anders Helisberg, the creator of Delphi. It is a C-like language syntactically close to C++ and Java. C# is actively used in Microsoft itself, in web development, and is also used in game development on the Unity engine.
In 2003 the Scala language created in Switzerland under the leadership of Martin Odersky was born. Its peculiarity was scalability and integration of object-oriented and functional programming. The closest ‘relatives’ of the language are Java and C++.
In November 2009 Google introduced a language with the laconic name Go, also known as GoLang. Google’s product was designed to be a relatively simple replacement for C and C++ that would be able to run efficiently on multi-core processors and distributed systems. Go was not a breakthrough, but it has become one of the popular modern languages. It is mainly used to create microservices and web applications.
Apple developed Swift as a simpler and more efficient replacement for C and Objective-C. It is a universal language, which is primarily used to write products for iOS and macOS and other systems of the corporation. It can sometimes be used to support websites and web applications.
This article is only a general description of the evolution of programming languages. It would take hundreds of pages to cover this topic in detail. However, the developers of Filio Force Inc hope that you have learnt something interesting and new.