2012 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
9. History of Programming Languages
Published in:
A Brief History of Computing
Abstract
Hardware is physical and may be seen and touched, whereas software is intangible and is an intellectual undertaking by a team of programmers. Software is written in a particular programming language, and hundreds of languages have been developed. Programming languages have evolved over time with the earliest languages using machine code to program the computer. The next development was the use of assembly languages to represent machine language instructions. These were then translated into machine code by an assembler. The next step was the development of high-level programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL. These were easier to use than assembly languages and machine code and helped to improve quality and productivity.