1968-1979: Establishing Fundamental Paradigms
The period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s brought a major flowering of programming languages. Most of the major language paradigms now in use were invented in this period:
- Simula, invented in the late 1960s by Nygaard and Dahl as a superset of Algol 60, was the first language designed to support object-oriented programming.
- C, an early systems programming language, was developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs between 1969 and 1973.
- Smalltalk (mid 1970s) provided a complete ground-up design of an object-oriented language.
- Prolog, designed in 1972 by Colmerauer, Roussel, and Kowalski, was the first logic programming language.
- ML built a polymorphic type system (invented by Robin Milner in 1973) on top of Lisp, pioneering statically typed functional programming languages.
Each of these languages spawned an entire family of descendants, and most modern languages count at least one of them in their ancestry.
The 1960s and 1970s also saw considerable debate over the merits of "structured programming", which essentially meant programming without the use of Goto. This debate was closely related to language design: some languages did not include GOTO, which forced structured programming on the programmer. Although the debate raged hotly at the time, nearly all programmers now agree that, even in languages that provide GOTO, it is bad programming style to use it except in rare circumstances. As a result, later generations of language designers have found the structured programming debate tedious and even bewildering.
Some important languages that were developed in this period include:
- 1968 - Logo
- 1969 - B (forerunner to C)
- 1970 - Pascal
- 1970 - Forth
- 1972 - C
- 1972 - Smalltalk
- 1972 - Prolog
- 1973 - ML
- 1975 - Scheme
- 1978 - SQL (initially only a query language, later extended with programming constructs)
Read more about this topic: History Of Programming Languages
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