WRITE AN ARTICLE OF DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTER LANGUAGE IN ABOUT 300 WORDS
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Answer:
The earliest electronic digital computers were designed and constructed for military or scientific purposes and were generally large, expensive, and designed for speed and reliability rather than ease of use. Programmers used numeric machine codes to communicate directly with the computer's hardware in order to achieve the high level of performance required by repetitive scientific computations. Since programming costs represented only a small percentage of the total cost of owning and operating these computers, and the amount of software development that occurred in this period was small, there was little incentive to develop expensive programming tools. A number of organizations developed assembler programs that allowed programmers to write software using simplified mnemonic codes instead of esoteric machine language, but for the most part programming in the early 1950s required extensive knowledge and a painstaking attention to detail. Individual programmers often developed reputations for their idiosyncratic styles and displays of virtuoso programming technique.
As commercial computers became less expensive and more widely used by corporations interested more in processing data than crunching numbers, the need for new programming methods and techniques became increasingly apparent. Computer manufacturers wanted to ensure that their devices were accessible to the broadest range of corporate consumers. Programmers hoped to eliminate some of the tedious clerical work associated with machine code and assembly language. Corporate managers wanted to free themselves from a dependence on apparently eccentric programmers. A whole host of new products appeared aimed at making programming less difficult and time consuming. Most of these so-called "auto-coders," however, simply exchanged one confusing and incomprehensible set of mnemonic shortcuts for another. As programming projects became larger and more complex, the costs of software development increased dramatically; by the middle of the 1950s it was estimated that programming and debugging accounted for as much as three-quarters of the cost of operating a computer.
The first widely used programming language, called FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator), was developed by the IBM Corporation in response to the rising costs of software development. The head of the FORTRAN development team, mathematician John Backus (1924- ), was outspoken in his belief that programming in the 1950s was "a black art" lacking in generally accepted standards and principles and overly dependent on the individual programmer's "private techniques and inventions." FORTRAN allowed programmers to describe their programs using relatively comprehensible algebraic expressions, rather than in cryptic assembly code. The FORTRAN compiler translated these algebraic expressions into the machine-level code required by the underlying hardware. One of the principle reasons behind the widespread adoption of FORTRAN was its ability to produce efficient machine code that would run almost as fast as that produced by the experienced programmers. Another is that it was supported by IBM, by then an industry giant. FORTRAN was an essential component of IBM's successful line of Model 704 computers, and by the end of the 1960s a version of FORTAN was available on almost every computer ever made up until that point.
FORTRAN was by no means the only high-level programming language developed in the 1950s, however. By the end of the decade, the proliferation of new computers and programming tools had created a veritable Tower of Babel of competing languages and dialects. A demand for a universal programming language developed among user groups and industry consortiums. In 1957 the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) began work on a universal programming language called ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language). Although ALGOL was never widely adopted outside of academia, the ACM effort highlighted the benefits of language standardization. In 1959 an influential group of government, military, and industry leaders held a meeting at the Pentagon to discuss the need for a common business-oriented programming language. The outcome of this and other meetings was the development of COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language). COBOL rapidly became a de facto standard within the business and defense community, largely as a result of a 1960 Department of Defense decree that the military would longer purchase or lease any computer that did not have a COBOL compiler available. Despite the many changes that have occurred in computer and programming technology since the early 1960s, COBOL remains the world's most widely used programming language.
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In computer science, computer languages are systems of communication with a computer. Such languages are used to create computer code or program code, the set of instructions forming a computer program which is executed by the computer. It is one of two components of the software which runs on computer hardware, the other being the data.
Computers can only execute the machine code instructions which are part of their instruction set. Because these instructions are difficult for humans to read, and writing complex programs in machine code or other low-level programming languages is a time-consuming task, most programmers write their source code in a high-level programming language. This source code is translated into machine code by a compiler or interpreter, so that the computer can execute it to perform its tasks. A compiler produces object code which is usually in machine language, but may also be in an intermediate language which is at a lower level than the source. A runtime system is often used to execute object code by linking it with commonly used libraries. Bytecode is a lower level of source which is designed for more efficient interpretation by interpreters.