125 papers · page 1 of 7
As its name suggests, the initial motivation for the D programming language was to improve on C and C++ while keeping their spirit. The D language was to preserve those languages' efficiency, low-level access, and Algol-style syntax. The areas D set out to improve focused initial…
Data science is increasingly important and challenging. It requires computational tools and programming environments that handle big data and difficult computations, while supporting creative, high-quality analysis. The R language and related software play a major role in computi…
The fully parenthesized Cambridge Polish syntax of Lisp, originally regarded as a temporary expedient to be replaced by more conventional syntax, possesses a peculiar virtue: A read procedure can parse it without knowing the syntax of any expressions, statements, definitions, or …
The roots of Objective-C began at ITT in the early 1980s in a research group led by Tom Love investigating improving programmer productivity by an order of magnitude, a concern motivated by the perceived "software crisis" articulated in the late 1960s. In 1981, Brad Cox, a member…
This paper describes the history of the Verilog hardware description language (HDL), including its influential predecessors and successors. Since its creation in 1984 and first sale in 1985, Verilog has completely revolutionized the design of hardware. Verilog enabled the develop…
Clojure was designed to be a general-purpose, practical functional language, suitable for use by professionals wherever its host language, e.g., Java, would be. Initially designed in 2005 and released in 2007, Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, but is not a direct descendant of any pr…
The Evolution of APL , the HOPL I paper by Falkoff and Iverson on APL, recounted the fundamental design principles which shaped the implementation of the APL language in 1966, and the early uses and other influences which shaped its first decade of enhancements. In the 40 years t…
This paper presents a personal view of the evolution of six generations of Smalltalk in which the author played a part, starting with Smalltalk-72 and progressing through Smalltalk-80 to Squeak and Etoys. It describes the forces that brought each generation into existence, the te…
This paper describes the history of the Groovy programming language. At the time of Groovy’s inception, Java was a dominant programming language with a wealth of useful libraries. Despite this, it was perceived by some to be evolving slowing and to have shortcomings for scripting…
LabVIEW™ is unusual among programming languages in that we did not intend to create a new language but rather to develop a tool for non-programmer scientists and engineers to assist them in automating their test and measurement systems. Prior experience creating software for cont…
The ML family of strict functional languages, which includes F#, OCaml, and Standard ML, evolved from the Meta Language of the LCF theorem proving system developed by Robin Milner and his research group at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s. This paper focuses on the histor…
The first MATLAB (the name is short for “Matrix Laboratory”) was not a programming language. Written in Fortran in the late 1970s, it was a simple interactive matrix calculator built on top of about a dozen subroutines from the LINPACK and EISPACK matrix software libraries. There…
While Emacs proponents largely agree that it is the world’s greatest text editor, it is almost as much a Lisp machine disguised as an editor. Indeed, one of its chief appeals is that it is programmable via its own programming language. Emacs Lisp is a Lisp in the classic traditio…
The coarray programming model is an expression of the Single-Program-Multiple-Data (SPMD) programming model through the simple device of adding a codimension to the Fortran language. A data object declared with a codimension is a coarray object. Codimensions express the idea that…
Oz is a programming language designed to support multiple programming paradigms in a clean factored way that is easy to program despite its broad coverage. It started in 1991 as a collaborative effort by the DFKI (Germany) and SICS (Sweden) and led to an influential system, Mozar…
Logo is more than a programming language. It is a learning environment where children explore mathematical ideas and create projects of their own design. Logo, the first computer language explicitly designed for children, was invented by Seymour Papert, Wallace Feurzeig, Daniel B…
By 2006, C++ had been in widespread industrial use for 20 years. It contained parts that had survived unchanged since introduced into C in the early 1970s as well as features that were novel in the early 2000s. From 2006 to 2020, the C++ developer community grew from about 3 mill…
This paper describes the genesis and early history of the F# programming language. I start with the origins of strongly-typed functional programming (FP) in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. During the same period, Microsoft was founded and grew to dominate the software industry. In 1997, …
How a sidekick scripting language for Java, created at Netscape in a ten-day hack, ships first as a de facto Web standard and eventually becomes the world's most widely used programming language. This paper tells the story of the creation, design, evolution, and standardization o…
Erlang was designed for writing concurrent programs that "run forever." Erlang uses concurrent processes to structure the program. These processes have no shared memory and communicate by asynchronous message passing. Erlang processes are lightweight and belong to the language, n…