At Acism, we often found new joinees lacking a good perspective on the software technology. The software technology was shaped not only through genius minds at work but also through business interests. For students and professionals aspiring to work in the technology area, it is crucial to understand this phenomena. This understanding enables them to understand better where the various programming languages are coming from, and also to create the right expectation of what to expect from a given language, given its classification. Therefore, for Acism's new joinees, we often cover this as a part of induction. When invited to give a tech talk at a PMI meet, we thought about sharing this understanding with the software project manager audience. For this talk, we attempted to capture this understanding in the slideshare. The talk was well-appreciated. The slideshare is shared below.

1. © Acism Software Private Limited
Technology Roundup
Historical Perspective
to Understand
New Age Technologies
Better
Ashish Belagali,
Acism Software Private Limited,
Pune
http://www.acism.com
@Ashish1IT

2. © Acism Software Private Limited
Agenda

The rise of Programming Languages

Paradigms

Takeaways

3. © Acism Software Private Limited
The Rise of Programming Languages

4. © Acism Software Private Limited
FORTRAN (1956)

Developed at IBM

Proposal by John W Backus to develop high
level language for mainframe (against
Assembly)

Reduced lines of code by a factor of 20

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ALGOL (1958)

The dawn of structured programming (as
against goto spaghetti code)

Developed jointly by a committee of European
and American scientists at a meeting at Zurich

6. © Acism Software Private Limited
LISP (1958)

History
− Invented by John McCarthy while he was at MIT
− First implemented by Steve Russel on IBM 704
computer
− First LISP compiler written in LISP in 1962

Interchangeability of data and code

Connection with AI

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COBOL (1960)

Proposed to Pentagon in 1959

Max use of English, machine independent

Almost dead before it was born

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Imperative
Low
level
FORTRAN
1956
Assembly
COBOL
1960
LISP
1958
Structured
ALGOL
1958

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Basic (1964)

Beginner's language – aimed at students from
non-computer background

Developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz

Based on Fortran II and ALGOL 60

Grew in minicomputer and microcomputer era

Lost to C and C++ in the era of Shrink-wrap
applications (later half of 1980s)

Revived again in VB and VB.Net

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SIMULA (1967)

Stands for Simula 1 and Simula 67

Developed at Norwegian Computing Center at
Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard

Superset of ALGOL 60

Simula 67 the first Object Oriented language

Introduced objects, classes, inheritance and
subclasses, virtual methods, coroutines,
discrete event simulation and garbage
collection

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Pascal (1970)

Designed by Niklaus Wirth to honor French
mathematician Blaise Pascal

Based on ALGOL 60 and enabled
programmers to define their own complex data
types
− Records, enumerations, subranges, dynamically
allocated variables with associated pointers and
sets

Allows nested procedure definition

Object Pascal powers Delphi IDE

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Prolog

Designed by Alain Colmerauer with Philippe
Roussel

A logic programming language – associated
with artificial intelligence and computational
linguistics

Completely declarative

specify rules and make queries

EU AI researchers favored Prolog (while
American AI researchers favored LISP)

13. © Acism Software Private Limited
Imperative
Declarative
Low
level
FORTRAN
1956
Assembly
COBOL
1960
LISP
1958
Structured
Object
oriented
Pascal
1970
BASIC
1964
Prolog
1972
SIMULA
1967
ALGOL
1958

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C (1973)

Created at Bell labs by Dennis Ritchie and Ken
Thomson

Low level and a high level language

Portable – Write Once Compile Anywhere
(WOCA)

Unix kernel reimplemented

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Ada (1980)

Extends from Pascal

Strong typing (variable ranges), modularity
mechanisms (packages), runtime checks,
parallel processing, exceptions, generic
dispatch

Ada 95 added object orientation

Designed for developing very large software
systems

Strong compile time, run time checks, memory
management type-safe


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Objective C (1983)
Developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love at their
company StepStone
Adding Smalltalk style messaging to C

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C++ (1983)

Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting 1979

Standardized in 1998

Superset of C language

Enhancing C language with Simula-like
features

18. © Acism Software Private Limited
Imperative
Declarative
Low
level
FORTRAN
1956
Assembly
COBOL
1960
LISP
1958
C
1973
Structured
C++
1983
Object
oriented
Pascal
1970
Ada
1980
BASIC
1964
Prolog
1972
Objective C
1983
SIMULA
1967
ALGOL
1958

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Matlab (1984)

Developed by Cleve Moler at Univ of New
Mexico - started in early 1970s

Intention was to give students access to
LINPACK and EISPACK without learning
FORTRAN

Mathworks company was formed in 1984

4th
Generation language

Mathematical computations

Image processing

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Perl (1987)

Derived ideas from unix shell scripting, awk and
sed

Started the trend of dynamic languages
– Powerful text processing
– Loose typing

Widely used in CGI scripting prior to PHP

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Haskell (1990)

Functional programming language – following a
start in 1985 (Miranda)

Originated by a committee formed in 1987 at
Portland, Oregon

Functions do not have side effects
− distinct construct for side effects orthogonal to
functions

Lazy evaluation, pattern matching, list
comprehension, type classes & type
polymorphism

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Visual Basic (1991)

Language and IDE

Rapid Application Development (RAD)

Easy to learn, Drag and Drop

Final release in 1998, unsupported since 2008

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Python (1991)

Developed by Guido Van Russon as a hobby

Readability, Fewer LOC

Supports multiple programming paradigms

Object oriented

Functional

Procedural

Dynamic types and automated memory
management

JVM variant Jython

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Ruby (1995)

Developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto

Purely object oriented

Supports multiple programming paradigms

Functional

Object oriented

Imperative

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PHP (1995)

Rasmus Lerdorf began to maintain his
personal homepage

There was no intent to write a programming
language

Dynamic, easy-to-use

Perl-like variables, form handling and HTML
embedding

Object orientation added in v5

No written specification existed till 2014. The
effort is now on.

26. © Acism Software Private Limited
Imperative
Declarative
Low
level
FORTRAN
1956
Assembly
COBOL
1960
LISP
1958
C
1973
Structured
C++
1983
Object
oriented
Pascal
1970
Ada
1980
BASIC
1964
VB
1991
Functional
Perl
1987
DynamicProlog
1972
Matlab
1984
Python
1991
Ruby
1995
PHP
1995
Objective C
1983
SIMULA
1967
ALGOL
1958
Haskell
1990

27. © Acism Software Private Limited
Java (1995)

Created by James Gosling at Sun
Microsystems

Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA)

Secure, configurable security

Java applets for web

Semi-interpreted, Java Virtual Machine (JVM)

Performance: JIT

Automatic memory management

Technologies: Applets, Servlets, JSP, Swing

28. © Acism Software Private Limited
Javascript (1995)

Designed by Brendan Eich at Netscape

Prototype-based scripting language, with
dynamic typing and first-class functions

Multi-paradigm

Object oriented

Imperative

Functional

29. © Acism Software Private Limited
Imperative
Declarative
Low
level
FORTRAN
1956
Assembly
COBOL
1960
LISP
1958
C
1973
Structured
C++
1983
Object
oriented
Pascal
1970
Ada
1980
JVM
languages
BASIC
1964
VB
1991
Functional
Perl
1987
DynamicProlog
1972
Matlab
1984
Python
1991
Ruby
1995
Javascript
1995
PHP
1995
Objective C
1983
Java
1995
SIMULA
1967
ALGOL
1958
Haskell
1990

30. © Acism Software Private Limited
.Net Framework (2002)

Common Language Runtime (CLR) Rivals JVM
− Managed vs native code
− Ahead of time compilation using native image
generator

Collection of languages:VB.Net, Fortran.Net,
C#

.Net Compact framework for Windows mobile

31. © Acism Software Private Limited
Scala (2003)

Designed by Martin Odersky

Previously he was in the Java compiler team

Both Object oriented and Functional

Statically typed, smaller in size

32. © Acism Software Private Limited
Imperative
Declarative
Low
level
FORTRAN
1956
Assembly
COBOL
1960
LISP
1958
C
1973
Structured
C++
1983
Object
oriented
Pascal
1970
Ada
1980
JVM
languages
.Net
2002
BASIC
1964
VB
1991
Haskell
1990
Functional
Perl
1987
DynamicProlog
1972
Matlab
1984
Python
1991
Ruby
1995
Javascript
1995
PHP
1995
Scala
2003
Objective C
1983
Java
1995
SIMULA
1967
ALGOL
1958

33. © Acism Software Private Limited
Paradigms

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Object Oriented Programming

Based on objects containing data fields

Use encapsulation and data hiding

Can be further classified into

Class based (object blueprint)

Prototype based (object cloning)

Separation of concerns such as Aspect oriented

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Dynamic Languages

Loose typing (duck typing)

Evolved as scripting languages – quick and
dirty

Mostly interpreted languages

Fast programming cycle

Compiler advantage lost

36. © Acism Software Private Limited
Domain Specific Languages

Declarative languages

Useful, still not general purpose (Turing-
complete)

Examples

Markup languages: HTML, MXML, XSL etc

Yacc input language

Make or Ant specification language

Hybrid (also have imperative part)

SQL

Regex

37. © Acism Software Private Limited
Functional Programming

Computation is evaluation of mathematical
functions

Functions are without side effects

Even logging – but some of these exceptions are
often admissible

Many popular languages –not labeled as
functional– can be used in functional
programming style

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JVM Languages

Produce Java bytecode, targeted to run on
Java Virtual Machine

JVM handles security, memory management

Also, can use Java's library

Java 6 onwards dynamic languages can run
faster

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4th
Generation Languages

Background

2GL – Assembly

3GL – C, C++, Java, Javascript, C# etc

4GL language operate with large collection of
information rather than bits and bytes

DB management, report generation,
mathematical optimizations, GUI development or
web development

Libraries like 4GL features are developed with
most popular 3GL languages. Also some
advanced 3GL languages include some 4GL

40. © Acism Software Private Limited
Visual Programming

Visual representation of the flow

Typically at a high level

Examples

Case tools

Business process modeling

Scratch

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Takeaways

Business inclinations, developer preferences
go into a language.

Good developers know at least 5 languages

Current trends

Mixing of paradigms

4GL, Visual

42. © Acism Software Private Limited
Thank You
Ashish Belagali,
Acism Software Private Limited,
Pune
http://www.acism.com
@Ashish1IT