The History of Computer Programming

The history of computer programming starts with the computer, although the concept of programming goes much farther back. Herman Hollerith discovered the idea of encoding information on punch cards by observing railroad conductors punch tickets, and implemented a records system of punch cards for the 1890 census. Modern computer programming started much later with a few basic languages which have influenced most modern computer languages. The three we will start with are FORTRAN, LISP and COBOL, all designed in the 1950s; many modern concepts come from them.

A Language for Everyone

Many languages designed in the early days of computing handled different tasks. Most of these languages were designed by the end users in academic or industrial positions and were not useful for anything other than their original purpose. FORTRAN, for example, was designed for mathematical functions and excelled in that area. COBOL was a business-oriented language and wasn't useful in scientific areas.

Coming Together

Through the 1970s, many people saw the need for languages to be interchangeable and useful for more than a single purpose. Efforts produced several languages like Pascal Forth and Prolog, but the most promising of the era were perhaps C (created at Bell Labs to replace a language named B) and SQL. C was one of the first object oriented languages and SQL was originally just a query language for databases but had programming constructs added later.

Objects to Share

Object-oriented programming caught on with C and its descendants. The concept was that you could write a module or object to perform a task and then reuse that bit of code in many other programs when you needed it. Reusability was one of the functions that brought about modern computing as we know it.

Mainframes and Business

In the 1980s, the needs of large corporations and businesses with mainframes and work stations led to a more refined language concept and some new languages. C++ came as the successor to C, and languages that let you work with large amounts of remote data like Perl came into use.

Modern Languages

Programming today was influenced by the phenomena of the Internet starting in the 1990s. New and more compact ways to manipulate data had to be invented as people wanted faster access to processed data over the Internet. C# was the next version of C, with more features than ever. Also in the running were small languages like Python, Java and Javascript, all perfect for serving up that application you wanted in your web browser. The trends today are leading toward smaller and more modular all the time with added mechanisms for security and functionality.