Informal History Of Programming Ideas

WelcomeVisitors stated circa 1996 that the Wiki pages hosted by WardCunningham are part of the PortlandPatternRepository and contain "an incomplete and casually written history of programming ideas". I'm suggesting that this page is used to highlight areas in which any Wiki reader feels that the current informally written history is either incomplete or unbalanced.

The overall philosophy of Wiki is the same as that of CollectiveCodeOwnership as taught in ExtremeProgramming: if you find a problem it belongs to you to fix it, not to blame others for it (or otherwise it would become WikiChaos). Nevertheless some areas aren't so easy to fix, because of the time or expertise required to complete the job.

If you detect any areas of lack below, please note them in an uncritical and undemanding way, and as succinctly as possible. You may still need to be part of the solution.

Programming Ideas Timelime

Observation, Exploration and Discovery
Geometry, Logic, Algebra, Trigonometry
Patterns and Organization
Arrangements, Structures and Algorithms
c. 87BC - Antikythera mechanism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
JosephMarieJacquard - inventor of a loom using punched cards
1822 - The DifferenceEngine - CharlesBabbage
1837 - The AnalyticalEngine - CharlesBabbage
ProgrammingLanguage - AugustaAdaByron
1879 (Begriffschrift) Formalisation of mathematical logic - GottlobFrege?
1928 - IBM invents the plug-board report-writer (see EarlyProgramming)
1930s DifferentialAnalyzer? - VannevarBush
1936 - The TuringMachine - AlanTuring
1939 - AtanasoffBerryComputer
1948 to 1970 - CurtaCalculator
194* - DigitalComputer? -
- AlanTuring & Colossus
- BletchleyPark
- KonradZuse
- ManchesterBaby? (21 June 1948) http://www.computer50.org/
- CambridgeEdsac? (6 May 1949) http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/UoCCL/misc/EDSAC99/ (see the simulator at OnLineComputerMuseum)
- ENIAC
Visual logic flow using "plug boards" (see EarlyProgramming)
StoredProgramComputer? - Some fight about that
1951 - FirstCommercialComputer
1951 - MarkImachine
1950s - IBM 7030 IbmStretch
AssemblyLanguage - GraceHopper
DesignByCommittee - bad ideas are also ideas
ProgrammingLanguage
1958 - LispLanguage -- recursion, tree structures, linked lists
1959 - CobolLanguage -- record structures
195? - FortranLanguage -- separate compilation
LogicInProgramming - Floyd, Knuth, Hoare, et al
1964 - DartmouthBasic
1960s - Algol 60: "A great improvement over its successors". Part of the AlgolLanguage family.
- Influenced procedural languages for the next several decades (for good or bad)
- Syntax and BackusNaurForm
- Block-structured programming, begin-end bracketing
- Call by reference, call by value
- First compiler written in the language it compiles (in boot-strap fashion)
- Proof that Algol structures can replace all gotos -- BoehmAndJaccopini?
- Dedicated database software (pre-relational)
1962 - AplLanguage - The acronym APL stands for the humbly named "A Programming Language". It can be characterised as an ArrayOrientedLanguage. It sparked interest in, and perhaps invented CollectionOrientedProgramming. APL spawned a family of languages over the years which are often used in financial applications.
1968 - ForthLanguage (ThreadedInterpreter? concept) -- ChuckMoore
1968 - EwDijkstra publishes "goto statement considered harmful" (see http://www.acm.org/classics/oct95/)
- Followed in 1973 by "Global Variable Found Harmful" (Wulf and Shaw)(See GlobalVariablesAreBad).
ProgrammingInLogic? - See PrologLanguage
ComputerScience - a theoretical framework
- NpComplete - what is 'practically' computable
- BigOhNotation (AlgorithmicComplexity) - what makes one algorithm 'faster' than another
ObjectOrientedProgramming (1967) - KristenNygaard, OleJohanDahl
- ScandinavianSchool
- SimulaLanguage, Simula67 - SimulaLanguage
- HeDidntInventTheTerm (AlanKay)
1969 - StandardGeneralizedMarkupLanguage
1969-71 - FlowBasedProgramming - PaulMorrison
1970 - DrCodd unveils the RelationalModel for database management, a database model based on SetTheory and PredicateLogic?.
197* - EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk
1977 - ActorsModel - CarlHewitt, HenryBaker, GulAgha
1986 - OopslaHistory
1987 - HistoryOfPatterns, CrcCard
1995 - SoftwareDesignPatterns
1997 - UnifiedModellingLanguage, JavaUnit
1998 - HistoryOfExtremeProgramming, ExtremeProgrammingTimeline
1999 - HistoryOfRefactoring

Some other ideas

Idea: A programming language based on queues of single bits and logical operations... sounds like a PostMachine?

Parallel thoughts:

Much discussion moved to InformalHistoryDiscussion.

I think it's important to capture this type of anecdotal history because many tricks and ideas which are broadly useful would otherwise get lost in the mists.

You've come to the right place! One of the purposes of WikiWiki is to capture these insights. See PortlandPatternRepository and PatternDefinition.

Just a thought - the abacus surely deserves a place here somewhere. Ok, so it's only been used as a calculator, but that's just a result of its programming ;-) -- DannyAyers

What about the InformalFutureOfProgrammingIdeas?

... it would be nice to add the HaltingProblem ... the "diff" algorithm and version control ... and stuff about communicating between computers: formats such as ASCII, Unicode, HTML, etc.; ... and transfer protocols such as KERMIT, XMODEM, TCP/IP, HTTP, etc. ... and distributed algorithms: RPC ... distributed version control

Informal history of programming languages (sort of).

http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html

CategoryWiki CategoryHistory