History of programming languages

The development of programming languages, unsurprisingly, follows closely the development of the physical and electronic processes used in today's computers.

Charles Babbage is often credited with designing the first computer-like machines, which had several programs written for them (in the equivalent of assembly language) by Ada Lovelace.

In the 1940s the first recognisably modern, electrically powered computers were created. Some military calculation needs were a driving force in early computer development, such as encryption, decryption, trajectory calculation and massive number crunching needed in the development of atomic bombs. At that time, computers were extremely large, slow and expensive: advances in electronic technology in the post-war years led to the construction of more practical electronic computers. At that time only Konrad Zuse imagined the use of a programming language (developed eventually as Plankalkül) like those of today for solving problems.

Subsequent breakthroughs in electronic technology (transistors, integrated circuits, and chips) drove the development of increasingly reliable and more usable computers. This was paralleled by the development of a variety of standardised computer languages to run on them. The improved availability and ease of use of computers led to a much wider circle of people who can deal with computers. The subsequent explosive development has resulted in the Internet, the ubiquity of personal computers, and increased use of computer programming, through more accessible languages such as Python, Visual Basic, etc.

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Classifications of programming languages

• Array programming language

• Concatenative programming language

• Concurrent programming language

• Declarative programming language

• Domain-specific programming language

• Dynamic programming language

• Educational programming language

• Esoteric programming language

• Functional programming language

• General-purpose programming language

• Logic programming language

• Object-oriented programming language

• Procedural programming language

• Scripting programming language

Major languages

The following are major programming languages used by at least several thousand programmers worldwide:

	Major programming languages	Edit (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:List_of_programming_languages&action=edit)
Ada | ALGOL | APL | AWK | BASIC | C | C++ | C# | COBOL | ColdFusion | Common Lisp | Delphi | Eiffel | Focus | Fortran | Haskell | IDL | Java | JavaScript | Lisp | Objective-C | OCaml | Pascal | Perl | PHP | Prolog | Python | Ruby | SAS | Scheme | Smalltalk | SQL | Visual Basic

19. Basic programming language. Basic programming language From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

BASIC is a family of high-level programming languages. Originally devised as an easy-to-use tool, it became widespread on home microcomputers in the 1980s, and remains popular to this day in a handful of heavily evolved dialects.

BASIC's name, coined in classic, computer science tradition to produce a nice acronym, stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,¹ tied to the name of an unpublished paper by the language's co-inventor, Thomas Kurtz (the name thus having no relation to C.K. Ogden's series "Basic English"). Several versions of the popular Jargon File once claimed that BASIC is a backronym created in the 1970s, (recent versions have corrected this). Evidence from the original Dartmouth BASIC manual (1964) show this to be untrue, but numerous online dictionaries and reference works on the Internet have now proliferated the earlier Jargon File's error.