A History of Coding Languages

A computer only understands one thing: numbers. Every programming language ever invented exists for the same reason — so that a person can write something a person can read, and have a machine turn it into those numbers afterwards.

The whole history below is that idea being pushed further and further.

Machine Code and Punch Cards

The first computers, in the 1940s and 50s, were programmed in machine code: instructions written as 0s and 1s, the actual numbers the machine runs on. There was no translation step, because there was nothing to translate.

Programs were often fed in on punch cards — stiff cards with holes punched through them, where the pattern of holes was the program. Drop the stack and your program was shuffled into nonsense.

High-Level Languages

As computers spread, writing everything in 0s and 1s became impossible to sustain. So people built languages closer to how humans write, and programs called compilers to turn them back into machine code.

FORTRAN arrived in the 1950s for science and engineering. COBOL followed for business. Both were hard work by today's standards, and both were an enormous improvement on what came before.

Think of it as the difference between building a house from raw clay and building one from bricks. The bricks are still your work — you just are not starting from mud.

Home Computers and Beyond

BASIC was built to be easy for beginners, and it is how a great many people first learned. C came next and was powerful enough to write whole operating systems in. Then C++, Java and Python.

Today there are hundreds, each suited to a different job. The reason old ones do not simply disappear is that working programs keep running, and someone has to maintain them.

Put Them In Order

Five of the things above, from the earliest way of programming to the most recent language named.

What Comes Next

Every language here was invented by someone who found the tools they had frustrating and built a better one. That has not stopped. The language you would use in twenty years' time may well not exist yet — and there is no rule saying you cannot be the person who writes it.