John Von Neumann was working at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1945, and he came up with a brilliant concept. Computer programs should be broken down into parts, some parts containing conditionally executed commands, allowing Ifs, Elses, and Loops. This was a milestone in computer programming. But just four years later, this concept became reality. This reality was called “Short Code,” and it was the first programming language, based on Von Neumann’s ideas. But it was impractical because people had to write down the 1s and 0s by hand. Then in 2 years, this impracticality was fixed. Grace Hopper starts to develop a compiler for Shortcode that automatically translates the code into Binary.

16 years pass. These 16 years contain huge accomplishments including the development and creation of more and more programming languages catered towards different audiences, like Fortran, and Lisp. In 1968, ALTRAN, a Fortran variant is available, but what is even more interesting is the development of the first language using object oriented concepts, called Simula. Object oriented Programming is the basis of many other programming languages, like Java, C++, C, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby and more. Then in 1972, Dennis Ritchie finished the development of the C programming language, which would dominate the world in a very short time. In 1980, C++ which was C with classes is developed by Bjarne Stroustup.

In 1991, HTML is described for the first time, Java is starting to be developed and Python is invented. Then in 1994 PHP is invented. In 1995, HTML 2 is released, JS is invented, Ruby is invented. Then in 2004, PHP5 is released. Then in 2009-2014, Go, CoffeeScript, Rust, Dart, HTML 5 and Swift were released. There was a lot of progress in Programming in just 70 years. In Von Neumann’s time it was a chore to program, but now, if you know how to, you just sit down on a computer, and you clack the keyboard, and run the program.

By Akash Deo