History of Programming Languages - The 1990s: The Internet Age

The 1990s: The Internet Age

The rapid growth of the Internet in the mid-1990s was the next major historic event in programming languages. By opening up a radically new platform for computer systems, the Internet created an opportunity for new languages to be adopted. In particular, the Java programming language rose to popularity because of its early integration with the Netscape Navigator web browser, and various scripting languages achieved widespread use in developing customized application for web servers. The 1990s saw no fundamental novelty in imperative languages, but much recombination and maturation of old ideas. This era began the spread of functional languages. A big driving philosophy was programmer productivity. Many "rapid application development" (RAD) languages emerged, which usually came with an IDE, garbage collection, and were descendants of older languages. All such languages were object-oriented. These included Object Pascal, Visual Basic, and Java. Java in particular received much attention. More radical and innovative than the RAD languages were the new scripting languages. These did not directly descend from other languages and featured new syntaxes and more liberal incorporation of features. Many consider these scripting languages to be more productive than even the RAD languages, but often because of choices that make small programs simpler but large programs more difficult to write and maintain. Nevertheless, scripting languages came to be the most prominent ones used in connection with the Web.

Some important languages that were developed in this period include:

• 1990 - Haskell
• 1991 - Python
• 1991 - Visual Basic
• 1991 - HTML (Mark-up Language)
• 1993 - Ruby
• 1993 - Lua
• 1994 - CLOS (part of ANSI Common Lisp)
• 1995 - Java
• 1995 - Delphi (Object Pascal)
• 1995 - JavaScript
• 1995 - PHP
• 1996 - WebDNA
• 1997 - Rebol
• 1999 - D