IT history
-
What was the mainstream programming language before C took the lead?
Non-sequitor. No programming language is mainstream.
-
COBOL, FORTRAN?
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated. I’m begging you for the benefit of everyone, don’t be STUPID.
How was switching from one generation of languages to another? Was it a hurdle or a natural evolution as the computers got better.
-
COBOL, FORTRAN?
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated. I’m begging you for the benefit of everyone, don’t be STUPID.
Yeah, each in their own sector. Fortran was never an option in business, Cobol was never an option in engineering. C's ability to knock out Cobol in business has been a lot less successful than most people believe. Even today, Cobol runs a lot of applications. Declining use of Cobol over the last few years (fewer than you would think!) is primarily due to universities not having educated new Cobol programmers for several decades: Those who could maintain the once billions of Cobol code lines (according to Wikipedia: 220 billion lines as late as 2017) are retiring. The needs covered by Cobol are still there. If C hasn't been an improvement for 50 years, it probably isn't today, just an emergency solution. Similarly, Fortran is still a very important language in supercomputing - a revised standard was published less than a year ago. Then again: "I don't know what programming languages will look like in year 2000, but they will be called Fortran!", as old guru Tony Hoare remarked to all the crazy extension proposals for Fortran-77. Fortran 2023 has only vague resemblance to Fortran of the 1970s. IBM tried to make PL/1 a common language for all application areas, including system programming. Let us say that it was a half success for some years - on IBM machines only. (But compilers exist for several other architectures.) In academic circles, a plethora of widely differing languages were known, and taught, in the late 1970s and 80s, such as Lisp, APL, Prolog, Snobol, Forth, Algol68 - all very different from the C family. Especially in compiler courses, students were expected to know a variety of language classes, not just the 'algorithmic' ones. The predecessor of C in academic circles was Algol60 in the 1960s and 70s, with Pascal taking over in the 70s and into the 80s. At some universities, for OO programming Simula67 (an OO extension of Algol60) was essential, but the world in general wasn't ready for OO at that time. Algol68 offered a lot of exciting 'academic' extensions that you might call 'experimental', so it was widely studied at academic institutions, but hardware wasn't ready for it yet, so few people used it for any serious work. C entered academics along with those other 'academic' languages that were not widely used in business and industry, and for several years were not considered a real alternative for production work. The main reason why it gradually took over the scene is that during the 1980s, universities dropped teaching of other languages: People fr
-
How was switching from one generation of languages to another? Was it a hurdle or a natural evolution as the computers got better.
As I mention in my other response: After 50 years of C, both Cobol and Fortran are still alive. I guess that comes closer to 'natural evolution'. In academics, there is a continuous line from Algol60 through Pascal to C - no great big revolution, only that C was an 'El Cheapo' language with a lot of features dropped in order to make a simpler, faster compiler. The change of language platforms for production use is a lot slower than you might be lead to think. Legacy is a lot more essential than what any university student discovers until he enters a job in business or industry. If he goes the academic route and becomes a professor himself, he probably never discovers it.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
-
What was the mainstream programming language before C took the lead?
FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Pascal
"It never ceases to amaze me that a spacecraft launched in 1977 can be fixed remotely from Earth." ― Brian Cox
-
Can you tell an approximate timeframe for when C took over? Was Dos written in C?
DOS is written in assembly language - originally in 8080 assembler. It is based on CP/M, which was an OS for the 8080. Essentially, 8080 assembler is source code compatible with 8086 assembler, but of course the 8086 has lots of extensions. I don't know how much these were used in the very first DOS versions (for the 8086 based IBM PC). Somewhere down in my basement is a ring binder that came with an IBM PC: The entire DOS source code is published there - if I could find it, I could tell, but a fast search was unsuccessful. Note that DOS is not a single OS, and not from a single vendor. There is at least half a dozen of DOS versions, from different vendors for IBM PC compatibles, each in multiple versions. Maybe some of the more recent ones were written in C. If anyone were to write a DOS emulator today, it would of course be implemented in C. The age when C took over is very diffuse, and people would give (highly) varying answers. It started spreading in academics through the 1980s, but didn't become what you'd call dominant until the late 80s. It probably occurred a few years earlier in the US than in Europe, but even in the US, it took quite a few years from its introduction until it had squeezed out everything else. In business and industry, it took a lot longer. To some degree, it hasn't happened yet ... (ref my other post). Let's say that in new application domains, such as internet communication, C has been dominant or the single alternative since the late 1980s. In established application domains, such as business, supercomputing, CAD/CAM and several others, C didn't gain a strong foothold until the 1990s, possibly late 1990, into the 2000s or even later - but that varies a lot with application domain. Most academics will tell that it happened much earlier - which is true within academics, which is what counts to a lot of academics. Lots of them consider Fortran and Cobol, and any other language with a not-C-like syntax, dead, historic languages.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
-
Pascal, FORTRAN, BASIC. You might have a look at this page: Timeline of programming languages - Wikipedia[^]
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?" -- Rigoletto
That list is a nice reference, but it only tells you when the language was developed, in several cases only in its very first version, and nothing about when it became widespread, generally adopted. If it became widespread, generally adopted! Most of them never were. An entry in Wikipedia only proves that at least one person still remembers the language.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
-
For me it was Modula 2 ;) Modula-2 - Wikipedia[^] about 1977 Ok, it came after C, about 1970 C (programming language) - Wikipedia[^]
And it never became 'mainstream'. Its predecessor. Pascal, was very much more so. (Modula was generally considered a 'grown up' version of Pascal, and could have been named 'Pascal-2'.)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
-
What was the mainstream programming language before C took the lead?
-
Before C there were lots of higher level assembly languages (Jean Sammett wrote in the 70-ies, may be even late 60-ies, a thick book with on the cover the tower of Babel. I myself used assembler (PDP-8, PDP-9) until I ported BCPL to the PDP-9, later using BCPL on and for the PDP-11 with cross compilation for the P860 (a small Philips 16 bit computer with obly papertape in and output). I actually wrote a lot of software in BCPL, including parser generators and a compiler for Algol 60 on the PDP-11 It was in app 1978 that we got Unix on a PDP-11 and obtained the original C Book
Member 12982558 wrote:
Before C there were lots of higher level assembly languages
I worked with an assembler that wasn't 'higher level' in the sense of being above single instruction, but its syntax gave much more of a 'high level language' feeling, when e.g. W1 * 5 to multiply register W1 by 5 (the specific multiplication instruction determined by the type of register/operand). To load a register: F3 := B.LocalFloatValue Similarly, storing a register: W2 =: GlobalValue This was (most definitely so!) a CISC machine, so you could program a loop by LOOP LoopIndex, IncrementBy, Limit, Label (usually placed at the end of the loop, with a negative displacement to Label, at the top. A conditional jump after an arithmetic operation or explicit compare was written as IF = GO Lab1 IF > GO Lab2 A function call: CALL FunctionName, argc, Arg1, Arg2, Arg3 And so on. Similar machines had similar instructions, but their assembler 'mnemonics' were far from mnemonic in nature - usually very hard to read/remember, cryptic abbreviations. If I had the choice between programming in K&R C or in the assembler above, I'd prefer the latter :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
-
B
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
:-) I'd call that an insider joke. B certainly is C's predecessor, but it hardly went mainstream. Very few programmers know anything at all about B without checking Wikipedia - and even after doing that, they probably have to read the fine print to distinguish a B program from a C program.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
-
What was the mainstream programming language before C took the lead?
We wrote machine code directly. In octal, because base 10 hadn't been invented yet. On punch cards. In Sanskrit In the snow, up hill, both ways.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
-
We wrote machine code directly. In octal, because base 10 hadn't been invented yet. On punch cards. In Sanskrit In the snow, up hill, both ways.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
-
What was the mainstream programming language before C took the lead?
The question does not have a definitive answer. You can't even answer the same question now and there are more ways to collect data. Following is the source I have used for a very long time. And I consider the data collection better than others but it is certainly open to question. TIOBE Index - TIOBE[^]
-
We wrote machine code directly. In octal, because base 10 hadn't been invented yet. On punch cards. In Sanskrit In the snow, up hill, both ways.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
Obligatory xkcd :)
-
The question does not have a definitive answer. You can't even answer the same question now and there are more ways to collect data. Following is the source I have used for a very long time. And I consider the data collection better than others but it is certainly open to question. TIOBE Index - TIOBE[^]
I certainly would not use the TIOBE Index as a reliable source of truth, though. Maybe it can tell you "something", but to me it appears like self-referencing: The TIOBE Index tells which languages top the TIOBE Index. Like "intelligence" is defined as "What you measure in an IQ test". To take one example: Last month, C popularity dropped by 2.38%, in a single month. No, that is not for real. Popularity doesn't change that rapidly for a well established and very widespread language (unless there are some strong, external factors that has hit the headlines of every software oriented internet publication). The presentation of the September 2024 values states that "C is currently at position #4, which is its lowest position ever since the start of the TIOBE index in 2001." That may be true, but the current reading is 8.89% - in August 2017 it was at 6.48%, that is significantly lower popularity. So is the popularity of a language given by the number of people / projects using it, or by how much (or little) the users of other languages tend to center on many or few other languages? You can use statistics to prove whatever you want. I also question their data collection methods. E.g. entries 51-100 are listed without sorting, so they don't reveal whether whitespace is #51, #100 or somewhere inbetween. Even if it really is #100: I refuse to believe that whitespace really is the 100th most popular programming language. Something is not 100% reliable in their collection of data.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
-
I certainly would not use the TIOBE Index as a reliable source of truth, though. Maybe it can tell you "something", but to me it appears like self-referencing: The TIOBE Index tells which languages top the TIOBE Index. Like "intelligence" is defined as "What you measure in an IQ test". To take one example: Last month, C popularity dropped by 2.38%, in a single month. No, that is not for real. Popularity doesn't change that rapidly for a well established and very widespread language (unless there are some strong, external factors that has hit the headlines of every software oriented internet publication). The presentation of the September 2024 values states that "C is currently at position #4, which is its lowest position ever since the start of the TIOBE index in 2001." That may be true, but the current reading is 8.89% - in August 2017 it was at 6.48%, that is significantly lower popularity. So is the popularity of a language given by the number of people / projects using it, or by how much (or little) the users of other languages tend to center on many or few other languages? You can use statistics to prove whatever you want. I also question their data collection methods. E.g. entries 51-100 are listed without sorting, so they don't reveal whether whitespace is #51, #100 or somewhere inbetween. Even if it really is #100: I refuse to believe that whitespace really is the 100th most popular programming language. Something is not 100% reliable in their collection of data.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
At the risk of repeating myself: "Statistics are used by rascals to convince fools" Author unknown (to me)
>64 It’s weird being the same age as old people. Live every day like it is your last; one day, it will be.
-
What was the mainstream programming language before C took the lead?
Pascal, BASIC, Fortran, COBOL, and I would even go out on a limb and say assembly.
Latest Articles:
A Lightweight Thread Safe In-Memory Keyed Generic Cache Collection Service A Dynamic Where Implementation for Entity Framework -
Pascal, BASIC, Fortran, COBOL, and I would even go out on a limb and say assembly.
Latest Articles:
A Lightweight Thread Safe In-Memory Keyed Generic Cache Collection Service A Dynamic Where Implementation for Entity FrameworkYou never tried Ada, ATLAS, JOVIAL or hpl? Of them, hpl was my favorite, simply because it drove QC people crazy. With hpl, I could modify the program on the fly, so there was no way to certify that the program that started the run would be the same code that actually executed. Good times! :laugh:
Will Rogers never met me.
-
Yeah, each in their own sector. Fortran was never an option in business, Cobol was never an option in engineering. C's ability to knock out Cobol in business has been a lot less successful than most people believe. Even today, Cobol runs a lot of applications. Declining use of Cobol over the last few years (fewer than you would think!) is primarily due to universities not having educated new Cobol programmers for several decades: Those who could maintain the once billions of Cobol code lines (according to Wikipedia: 220 billion lines as late as 2017) are retiring. The needs covered by Cobol are still there. If C hasn't been an improvement for 50 years, it probably isn't today, just an emergency solution. Similarly, Fortran is still a very important language in supercomputing - a revised standard was published less than a year ago. Then again: "I don't know what programming languages will look like in year 2000, but they will be called Fortran!", as old guru Tony Hoare remarked to all the crazy extension proposals for Fortran-77. Fortran 2023 has only vague resemblance to Fortran of the 1970s. IBM tried to make PL/1 a common language for all application areas, including system programming. Let us say that it was a half success for some years - on IBM machines only. (But compilers exist for several other architectures.) In academic circles, a plethora of widely differing languages were known, and taught, in the late 1970s and 80s, such as Lisp, APL, Prolog, Snobol, Forth, Algol68 - all very different from the C family. Especially in compiler courses, students were expected to know a variety of language classes, not just the 'algorithmic' ones. The predecessor of C in academic circles was Algol60 in the 1960s and 70s, with Pascal taking over in the 70s and into the 80s. At some universities, for OO programming Simula67 (an OO extension of Algol60) was essential, but the world in general wasn't ready for OO at that time. Algol68 offered a lot of exciting 'academic' extensions that you might call 'experimental', so it was widely studied at academic institutions, but hardware wasn't ready for it yet, so few people used it for any serious work. C entered academics along with those other 'academic' languages that were not widely used in business and industry, and for several years were not considered a real alternative for production work. The main reason why it gradually took over the scene is that during the 1980s, universities dropped teaching of other languages: People fr
trønderen wrote: Give a programmer of today a program in Lisp, APL, Snobol, Forth ... and he would hardly recognize it as computer program. If you try to present arguments for any not-C-looking language today, you are usually met with a blank stare Reminds me of learning Prolog. The first thing I had to do was forget everything I thought I knew about programming. CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr.PhD P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
