List the important stages in the development of programming languages?

Answer 1

Important stages have involved the shift from syntax which is more easily understood by computer to syntax which is more easily understood by humans.

This can bee seen from how the very first programs were made up of a series of 1s and 0s (called Binary). This then lead onto Assembly language, which although was easier for humans to write and understand, the premise was still based on the computer where data had to be moved between registers within the computer and computed at very low level.

Mid-level languages such as C, Pascal, Cobol etc came along. These were sequential programming languages. There would be a main area of execution within the program but everything would happen as programmed sequetially. These languages were quite powerful compared to Binary and Assembly language. But they had their flaws. They couldn't represent the real world very well and often lots of code needed to be written to achieve relatively simple things.

Object Oriented programming languages (High Level languages) were then introduced, such as Java and C#. The languages provided ways to model the real world by creating objects which had their own attributes and behaviours and could interact with each other and the main program. OO languages were again more easily read/written by humans and a fundamental development was that shift of focus from the code to the data. OO languages put the program data as the centreal and most important part of the system, and the code is written around the data. Meaning that there can be more flexibility when making changes to the software.

Fourth Generation Programming Languages (which aren't very common and not really professionally used) are programs which are created by a computer. The way they work is that humans write in pseudo-code, i.e basic english statements about what should happen. An intelligent compiler than generates the code based on the abstract pseudo code or from other methods such as generating the code from graphical diagrams or mathematical equations.

There are flaws to 4GL languages, and that is although sometimes the computer can generate code which is more efificent, they are also capable of producing VERY inefficient code and code which is not suitable for the purpose.

Answer 2

First of all there was no programing language and people used to send machine codes directly to the machine in binary mode. Later on these instrutions were assembled together with instructions for move , jump, loop etc etc were combined together to form the assembly language. This is the first programing language. Later Fortran came which is one of the foremost high level language. Then onwards program languages like Pascal, PL1, Basic, Cobol came . Then much later the C language came which almost changed the computer world and this was followed by C++ , Java & C# . Whatever the language is the functions are always same. Like reading , writing, variables, functions like multiply, divide, looping, comparing, etc etc.

Answer 3

Can you expand on the topic please.