History of Computer Science: Programming languages

Every Computer Science student begins their programming skills by learning their first programming language, which may be Java, C, or any other language. Most students today start off their programming skills with the popular languages such as Java, C, C++, or Python due to it being more readable and structured. But what about the languages that helped inspire these languages? In the 1950’s saw the rise of many second generation (Assembly language) and third generation of programming languages (Fortran, COBOL, Lisp). These languages are considered the oldest, but are still used today.

The idea of second generation languages were to have native machine instructions written in a way that it would be readable for humans by using symbols for instructions and memory addresses. It was called assembly language because people would run the text through a utility called an “assembler” that would translate the nearly-human-readable code into machine instructions.

The purpose for the third generation of programming languages was to solve machine-specific problems and make programs more understandable. “The third generation languages made it possible for businesses to create huge, complex applications that would remain in service for decades such as supercomputing applications, AI development, or business software." NASA, credit cards, and ATMs still use these languages till this day.

Soon later, the idea of structured programming was thought of and the languages that we know and use were invented. For a brief history of programming languages, I offer you a visual chart that can be found at http://www.veracode.com/blog/2013/04/the-history-of-programming-languages-infographic/.