History of programming languages

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

“The history of programming languages spans from documentation of early mechanical computers to modern tools for software development. Early programming languages were highly specialized, relying on mathematical notation and similarly obscure syntax. Throughout the 20th century, research in compiler theory led to the creation of high-level programming languages, which use a more accessible syntax to communicate instructions. The first high-level programming language was Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. … 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: Speakeasy, developed in 1964 at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) by Stanley Cohen, is an OOPS (object-oriented programming system, much like the later MATLAB, IDL and Mathematica) numerical package. … 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. FORTH, the earliest concatenative programming language was designed by Charles Moore in 1969 as a personal development system while at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. 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. …”
W – History of programming languages
W – Computer_program

Program vs. Process vs. Thread, Scheduling, Preemption, Context Switching