Quick overview of the evolution of programming languages

All used programming languages evolve over the years, and the evolution of those and the programming paradigms changes the way of creating and developing software. Many programming languages are created every year to solve better certain software developing problems. From the next picture, you can see how programming languages are related to each other:

1970s

The 70s were years of great development of programming languages and programming paradigms. Most of programming paradigms of this period are currently the most used nowadays.

Simula, C, Smalltalk, Prolog, ML or SQL are just probably the most important and revolutionary programming languages of this period. Every one of them has generated and influenced a family of other programming languages that today are the most used ones, such as Java, C++ or Python.

These years have also seen the came out of the structured programming paradigm, a programming paradigm that was emerging at that time, which essentially means programming without the construct "goto"¹, which allows unconditional jumps in the source code, and, more or less for all programmers, it’s a bad programming style, except in rare cases.

Many designers of programming languages decided not to include the instruction "goto" in their new programming languages to avoid bad programming practices.

1980s

The 1980s are years of consolidation of imperative languages, and are also characterized by the birth of new revolutionary programming languages, such as C++, Common Lisp (a new dialect of the older Lisp programming language), MatLab, Eiffel, Objective-C, Perl or Tcl.

All these programming languages have their new characteristics, usually the result of the mix of more than one programming paradigm, but it’s not always the case. For example, the C++ programming language was designed to organize the raw power of C using OOP, but maintain the speed of C, and be able to run on many different types of computers.

Some programming paradigms, such as functional and logic paradigms were increasingly supported.

The United States government standardized Ada, a system programming language intended for use by defense contractors.

Another important thing was the beginning of the use of modules or libraries for large scale programming. Software had become more and more complex over the years, and new techniques of developing were necessarily introduced.

Many new programming languages started to support the revolutionary object-oriented paradigm or OOP.

New improvements in implementing the programming languages were made.

Early 90s

Early 90s were characterized by the rapid growth of internet and all its benefits, and the interactive TV was the technology of the future. These two factors had a big impact also on programming languages. New programming languages were invented for web programming, such as Java, PHP or JavaScript. Other important languages were also invented, for example the Python or the Visual Basic programming language, which was based on the older BASIC programming language, one of the first programming language in the history.