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Languages

Languages

Early Languages (1960s and earlier)

  • COBOL: Probably the first language that looked "human readable". Invented with "business" in mind, ie, banks, corporations, etc. Still in use at many financial places as their installations are huge and would be expensive to replace/rewrite. COBOL programmers are very hard to find and very expensive.

  • Fortran: Developed at IBM in the 1950s, still incredibly popular today for economics calculations, math, finance, etc. Popular in academia for this reason.

  • C: Massively influential. probably the most famous programming language. Invented at Bell Labs in the 60s. Still in incredibly wide use for such applications as operating systems, microcontrollers, or anything where speed is a necessary. Very fast, but easy to write buggy code. Runs on almost any hardware ever made. It's syntax and idioms live on in Java, JavaScript, C#, C++

Middle-aged languages (1970s & 1980s)

  • C++: Created in the 1980s, like C but with more features. Used extensively in places where speed is critical (like Google).

  • Lisp: Used extensively for artificial intelligence research and elsewhere in academia for programming language research in the 1970s. Fell out of favor after that, and has remained niche since then. Massively influential, many of the ideas that originated in Lisp live on in contemporary languages like Ruby, Clojure, and JavaScript.

  • SQL: Structured Query Language. The language by which we interact with almost every database system, massively still in use today.

Recent languages (1990s)

  • Java: created at Sun Microsystems in the 1990s. Probably the most dominant "backend" language today (meaning it runs on servers). Runs almost anything you can think of: banking software, web servers, desktop applications, etc. Runs on what is called the Java Virtual Machine, a platform that is renowned for its stablity, speed, and power. Seen as popular in "enterprise", aka big corporations, it is popular everywhere because of its enormous community.

  • C#/.NET: Microsoft languages, similar to Java in most ways. Popular at companies who like Microsoft products and services, which is many.

  • JavaScript: Created by Brendan Eich at Netscape in the early 1990s. The name comes from the fact that Java was growing in popularity at the time, and Netscape wanted to capitalize on this. Not actually related to Java in anything other than syntax. It powers the interactive features of the web. Interactive sites like Gmail and ESPN make heavy use of JavaScript. The most widely spread language of all time, it runs on all web browsers. Also runs on servers via something called Node.js.

  • Ruby: Japanese language from the early 1990s. Almost totally unknown in the West until a Danish programmer called David Heinemeier Hansson created a powerful platform for website creation called Ruby on Rails, using the Ruby language. Popular for anything web related. Big in the startup community.

  • Python: Similar style language to Ruby. Popular for web stuff, scientific/numerical computing, robots, teaching, etc. Many, many different uses.

  • PHP: Extremely popular for website creation, it powers platforms like Drupal and Wordpress. Still the most popular for this task, despite criticism of it being inferior to languages like Python or Ruby. Facebook was written in PHP and still maintains an enormous amount of PHP code.

Most recent languages (2000s)

  • Swift: Apple's new language, not even finalized. Used to build iOS and Mac apps. Not yet used for anything else. Apple specific.

  • Clojure: A variant of Lisp (1970s), it has been gaining popularity as of late. Runs on the Java Virtual Machine.

  • Scala: Like Java, but with more features (similar to the C - C++ relationship). Also runs on the Java Virtual Machine. Gaining popularity.

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