Visual Basic (.NET)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(.NET)

A Windows Forms form made in Visual Basic showing some commonly-used controls
Paradigm	Multi-paradigm: structured, imperative, object-oriented, declarative, generic, reflective and event-driven
Designed by	Microsoft
Developer	Microsoft
First appeared	2001; 22 years ago
Stable release	16.9.15 / 14 December 2021; 16 months ago
Typing discipline	Static, both strong and weak, both safe and unsafe, nominative
Platform	.NET Framework, Mono, .NET
OS	Chiefly Windows Also on Android, BSD, iOS, Linux, macOS, Solaris, and Unix
License	Roslyn compiler: Apache License 2.0
Filename extensions	.vb
Website	docs.microsoft.com/dotnet/visual-basic/
Major implementations
.NET Framework SDK, Roslyn Compiler and Mono
Dialects
Microsoft Visual Basic
Influenced by
Classic Visual Basic
Influenced
Small Basic

Visual Basic (VB), originally called Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), is a multi-paradigm, object-oriented programming language, implemented on .NET, Mono, and the .NET Framework. Microsoft launched VB.NET in 2002 as the successor to its original Visual Basic language, the last version of which was Visual Basic 6.0. Although the ".NET" portion of the name was dropped in 2005, this article uses "Visual Basic [.NET]" to refer to all Visual Basic languages released since 2002, in order to distinguish between them and the classic Visual Basic. Along with C# and F#, it is one of the three main languages targeting the .NET ecosystem. Microsoft updated its VB language strategy on 6 Feb 2023 stating that VB is a stable language now and Microsoft will keep maintaining it.

Microsoft's integrated development environment (IDE) for developing in Visual Basic is Visual Studio. Most Visual Studio editions are commercial; the only exceptions are Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio Community, which are freeware. In addition, the .NET Framework SDK includes a freeware command-line compiler called vbc.exe. Mono also includes a command-line VB.NET compiler.

Visual Basic is often used in conjunction with the Windows Forms GUI library to make desktop apps for Windows. Programming for Windows Forms with Visual Basic involves dragging and dropping controls on a form using a GUI designer and writing corresponding code for each control.

Use in making GUI programs

See also: Windows Forms

The Windows Forms library is most commonly used to create GUI interfaces in Visual Basic. All visual elements in the Windows Forms class library derive from the Control class. This provides the minimal functionality of a user interface element such as location, size, color, font, text, as well as common events like click and drag/drop. The Control class also has docking support to let a control rearrange its position under its parent.

Forms are typically designed in the Visual Studio IDE. In Visual Studio, forms are created using drag-and-drop techniques. A tool is used to place controls (e.g., text boxes, buttons, etc.) on the form (window). Controls have attributes and event handlers associated with them. Default values are provided when the control is created, but may be changed by the programmer. Many attribute values can be modified during run time based on user actions or changes in the environment, providing a dynamic application. For example, code can be inserted into the form resize event handler to reposition a control so that it remains centered on the form, expands to fill up the form, etc. By inserting code into the event handler for a keypress in a text box, the program can automatically translate the case of the text being entered, or even prevent certain characters from being inserted.

Syntax

Visual Basic uses statements to specify actions. The most common statement is an expression statement, consisting of an expression to be evaluated, on a single line. As part of that evaluation, functions or subroutines may be called and variables may be assigned new values. To modify the normal sequential execution of statements, Visual Basic provides several control-flow statements identified by reserved keywords. Structured programming is supported by several constructs including two conditional execution constructs (If ... Then ... Else ... End If and Select Case ... Case ... End Select ) and three iterative execution (loop) constructs (Do ... Loop, For ... To, and For Each) . The For ... To statement has separate initialisation and testing sections, both of which must be present. (See examples below.) The For Each statement steps through each value in a list.

In addition, in Visual Basic:

• There is no unified way of defining blocks of statements. Instead, certain keywords, such as "If … Then" or "Sub" are interpreted as starters of sub-blocks of code and have matching termination keywords such as "End If" or "End Sub".
• Statements are terminated either with a colon (":") or with the end of line. Multiple-line statements in Visual Basic are enabled with " _" at the end of each such line. The need for the underscore continuation character was largely removed in version 10 and later versions.^[7]
• The equals sign ("=") is used in both assigning values to variables and in comparison.
• Round brackets (parentheses) are used with arrays, both to declare them and to get a value at a given index in one of them. Visual Basic uses round brackets to define the parameters of subroutines or functions.
• A single quotation mark (') or the keyword REM, placed at the beginning of a line or after any number of space or tab characters at the beginning of a line, or after other code on a line, indicates that the (remainder of the) line is a comment.

Simple example

The following is a very simple Visual Basic program, a version of the classic "Hello, World!" example created as a console application:

Module Module1

    Sub Main()
        ' The classic "Hello, World!" demonstration program
        Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!")
    End Sub

End Module

It prints "Hello, World!" on a command-line window. Each line serves a specific purpose, as follows:

Module Module1

This is a module definition. Modules are a division of code, which can contain any kind of object, like constants or variables, functions or methods, or classes, but can't be instantiated as objects like classes and cannot inherit from other modules. Modules serve as containers of code that can be referenced from other parts of a program.^[8]
It is common practice for a module and the code file which contains it to have the same name. However, this is not required, as a single code file may contain more than one module and/or class.

Sub Main()

This line defines a subroutine called "Main". "Main" is the entry point, where the program begins execution.^[9]

Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!")

This line performs the actual task of writing the output. Console is a system object, representing a command-line interface (also known as a "console") and granting programmatic access to the operating system's standard streams. The program calls the Console method WriteLine, which causes the string passed to it to be displayed on the console.

Instead of Console.WriteLine, one could use MsgBox, which prints the message in a dialog box instead of a command-line window.

Complex example

This piece of code outputs Floyd's Triangle to the console:

Imports System.Console

Module Program

    Sub Main()
        Dim rows As Integer

        ' Input validation.
        Do Until Integer.TryParse(ReadLine("Enter a value for how many rows to be displayed: " & vbcrlf), rows) AndAlso rows >= 1
            WriteLine("Allowed range is 1 and {0}", Integer.MaxValue)
        Loop
      
        ' Output of Floyd's Triangle
        Dim current As Integer = 1
        Dim row As Integer 
        Dim column As Integer
        For row = 1 To rows
            For column = 1 To row
                Write("{0,-2} ", current)
                current += 1
            Next

            WriteLine()
        Next
    End Sub

    ''' <summary>
    ''' Like Console.ReadLine but takes a prompt string.
    ''' </summary>
    Function ReadLine(Optional prompt As String = Nothing) As String
        If prompt IsNot Nothing Then
            Write(prompt)
        End If

        Return Console.ReadLine()
    End Function

End Module

Comparison with the classic Visual Basic

Main article: Comparison of Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET

Whether Visual Basic .NET should be considered as just another version of Visual Basic or a completely different language is a topic of debate. There are new additions to support new features, such as structured exception handling and short-circuited expressions. Also, two important data-type changes occurred with the move to VB.NET: compared to Visual Basic 6, the Integer data type has been doubled in length from 16 bits to 32 bits, and the Long data type has been doubled in length from 32 bits to 64 bits. This is true for all versions of VB.NET. A 16-bit integer in all versions of VB.NET is now known as a Short. Similarly, the Windows Forms editor is very similar in style and function to the Visual Basic form editor.

The things that have changed significantly are the semantics—from those of an object-based programming language running on a deterministic, reference-counted engine based on COM to a fully object-oriented language backed by the .NET Framework, which consists of a combination of the Common Language Runtime (a virtual machine using generational garbage collection and a just-in-time compilation engine) and a far larger class library. The increased breadth of the latter is also a problem that VB developers have to deal with when coming to the language, although this is somewhat addressed by the My feature in Visual Studio 2005.

The changes have altered many underlying assumptions about the "right" thing to do with respect to performance and maintainability. Some functions and libraries no longer exist; others are available, but not as efficient as the "native" .NET alternatives. Even if they compile, most converted Visual Basic 6 applications will require some level of refactoring to take full advantage of the new language. Documentation is available to cover changes in the syntax, debugging applications, deployment and terminology.

Comparative examples

The following simple examples compare VB and VB.NET syntax. They assume that the developer has created a form, placed a button on it and has associated the subroutines demonstrated in each example with the click event handler of the mentioned button. Each example creates a "Hello, World" message box after the button on the form is clicked.

Visual Basic 6:

Private Sub Command1_Click()
    MsgBox "Hello, World"
End Sub

VB.NET (MsgBox or MessageBox class can be used):

Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As object, e As EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
    MsgBox("Hello, World")
End Sub

• Both Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET automatically generate the Sub and End Sub statements when the corresponding button is double-clicked in design view. Visual Basic .NET will also generate the necessary Class and End Class statements. The developer need only add the statement to display the "Hello, World" message box.
• All procedure calls must be made with parentheses in VB.NET, whereas in Visual Basic 6 there were different conventions for functions (parentheses required) and subs (no parentheses allowed, unless called using the keyword Call).
• The names Command1 and Button1 are not obligatory. However, these are default names for a command button in Visual Basic 6 and VB.NET respectively.
• In VB.NET, the Handles keyword is used to make the sub Button1_Click a handler for the Click event of the object Button1. In Visual Basic 6, event handler subs must have a specific name consisting of the object's name ("Command1"), an underscore ("_"), and the event's name ("Click", hence "Command1_Click").
• There is a function called MessageBox.Show in the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace which can be used (instead of MsgBox) similarly to the corresponding function in Visual Basic 6. There is a controversy about which function to use as a best practice (not only restricted to showing message boxes but also regarding other features of the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace). Some programmers prefer to do things "the .NET way", since the Framework classes have more features and are less language-specific. Others argue that using language-specific features makes code more readable (for example, using int (C#) or Integer (VB.NET) instead of System.Int32).
• In Visual Basic 2008, the inclusion of ByVal sender as Object, ByVal e as EventArgs has become optional.

The following example demonstrates a difference between Visual Basic 6 and VB.NET. Both examples close the active window.

Visual Basic 6:

Sub cmdClose_Click()
    Unload Me
End Sub

VB.NET:

Sub btnClose_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles btnClose.Click
    Close()
End Sub

The 'cmd' prefix is replaced by the 'btn' prefix, conforming to the new convention previously mentioned.

Visual Basic 6 did not provide common operator shortcuts. The following are equivalent:

Visual Basic 6:

Sub Timer1_Timer()
    'Reduces Form Height by one pixel per tick
    Me.Height = Me.Height - 1
End Sub

VB.NET:

Sub Timer1_Tick(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles Timer1.Tick
    Me.Height -= 1
End Sub

Comparison with C#

Main article: Comparison of C Sharp and Visual Basic .NET

C# and Visual Basic are Microsoft's first languages made to program on the .NET Framework (later adding F# and more; others have also added languages). Though C# and Visual Basic are syntactically different, that is where the differences mostly end. Microsoft developed both of these languages to be part of the same .NET Framework development platform. They are both developed, managed, and supported by the same language development team at Microsoft. They compile to the same intermediate language (IL), which runs against the same .NET Framework runtime libraries. Although there are some differences in the programming constructs, their differences are primarily syntactic and, assuming one avoids the Visual Basic "Compatibility" libraries provided by Microsoft to aid conversion from Visual Basic 6, almost every feature in VB has an equivalent feature in C# and vice versa. Lastly, both languages reference the same Base Classes of the .NET Framework to extend their functionality. As a result, with few exceptions, a program written in either language can be run through a simple syntax converter to translate to the other. There are many open source and commercially available products for this task.

Examples

Hello World!

Windows Forms Application

Requires a button called Button1.

Public Class Form1

    Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
        MsgBox("Hello world!", MsgBoxStyle.Information, "Hello world!") ' Show a message that says "Hello world!".
    End Sub
End Class

Hello world! window

Console Application

Module Module1

    Sub Main()
        Console.WriteLine("Hello world!") ' Write in the console "Hello world!" and start a new line.
        Console.ReadKey() ' The user must press any key before the application ends.
    End Sub
End Module

Speaking

Windows Forms Application

Requires a TextBox titled 'TextBox1' and a button called Button1.

Public Class Form1
    
    Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
        CreateObject("Sapi.Spvoice").Speak(TextBox1.Text)
    End Sub
End Class

Console Application

Module Module1
    Private Voice = CreateObject("Sapi.Spvoice")
    Private Text As String

    Sub Main()
        Console.Write("Enter the text to speak: ") ' Say "Enter the text to speak: "
        Text = Console.ReadLine() ' The user must enter the text to speak.
        Voice.Speak(Text) ' Speak the text the user has entered.
    End Sub
End Module

Version history

Succeeding the classic Visual Basic version 6.0, the first version of Visual Basic .NET debuted in 2002. As of 2020, ten versions of Visual Basic .NET are released.

2002 (VB 7.0)

The first version, Visual Basic .NET, relies on .NET Framework 1.0. The most important feature is managed code, which contrasts with the classic Visual Basic.

2003 (VB 7.1)

Visual Basic .NET 2003 was released with .NET Framework 1.1. New features included support for the .NET Compact Framework and a better VB upgrade wizard. Improvements were also made to the performance and reliability of .NET IDE (particularly the background compiler) and runtime. In addition, Visual Basic .NET 2003 was available in the Visual Studio.NET Academic Edition, distributed to a certain number of scholars from each country without cost.

2005 (VB 8.0)

After Visual Basic .NET 2003, Microsoft dropped ".NET" from the name of the product, calling the next version Visual Basic 2005.

For this release, Microsoft added many features intended to reinforce Visual Basic .NET's focus as a rapid application development platform and further differentiate it from C#., including:

• Edit and Continue feature
• Design-time expression evaluation
• A pseudo-namespace called "My", which provides:
  • Easy access to certain areas of the .NET Framework that otherwise require significant code to access like using My.Form2.Text = " MainForm " rather than System.WindowsApplication1.Forms.Form2.text = " MainForm "
  • Dynamically generated classes (e.g. My.Forms)
• Improved VB-to-VB.NET converter
• A "using" keyword, simplifying the use of objects that require the Dispose pattern to free resources
• Just My Code feature, which hides (steps over) boilerplate code written by the Visual Studio .NET IDE and system library code during debugging
• Data Source binding, easing database client/server development

To bridge the gaps between itself and other .NET languages, this version added:

• Generics
• Partial classes, a method of defining some parts of a class in one file and then adding more definitions later; particularly useful for integrating user code with auto-generated code
• Operator overloading and nullable types
• Support for unsigned integer data types commonly used in other languages

Visual Basic 2005 introduced the IsNot operator that makes 'If X IsNot Y' equivalent to 'If Not X Is Y'. It gained notoriety when it was found to be the subject of a Microsoft patent application.

2008 (VB 9.0)

Visual Basic 9.0 was released along with .NET Framework 3.5 on November 19, 2007.

For this release, Microsoft added many features, including:

• A true conditional operator, "If(condition as boolean, truepart, falsepart)", to replace the "IIf" function.
• Anonymous types
• Support for LINQ
• Lambda expressions
• XML Literals
• Type Inference
• Extension methods

2010 (VB 10.0)

In April 2010, Microsoft released Visual Basic 2010. Microsoft had planned to use Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) for that release but shifted to a co-evolution strategy between Visual Basic and sister language C# to bring both languages into closer parity with one another. Visual Basic's innate ability to interact dynamically with CLR and COM objects has been enhanced to work with dynamic languages built on the DLR such as IronPython and IronRuby. The Visual Basic compiler was improved to infer line continuation in a set of common contexts, in many cases removing the need for the " _" line continuation characters. Also, existing support of inline Functions was complemented with support for inline Subs as well as multi-line versions of both Sub and Function lambdas.

2012 (VB 11.0)

Visual Basic 2012 was released alongside .NET Framework 4.5. Major features introduced in this version include:

• Asynchronous programming with "async" and "await" statements
• Iterators
• Call hierarchy
• Caller information
• "Global" keyword in "namespace" statements

2013 (VB 12.0)

Visual Basic 2013 was released alongside .NET Framework 4.5.1 with Visual Studio 2013. Can also build .NET Framework 4.5.2 applications by installing Developer Pack.

2015 (VB 14.0)

Visual Basic 2015 (code named VB "14.0") was released with Visual Studio 2015. Language features include a new "?." operator to perform inline null checks, and a new string interpolation feature is included to format strings inline.

2017 (VB 15.x)

Visual Basic 2017 (code named VB "15.0") was released with Visual Studio 2017. Extends support for new Visual Basic 15 language features with revision 2017, 15.3, 15.5, 15.8. Introduces new refactorings that allow organizing source code with one action.

2019 (VB 16.0)

Visual Basic 2019 (code named VB "16.0") was released with Visual Studio 2019. It is the first version of Visual Basic focused on .NET Core.

Cross-platform and open-source development

The official Visual Basic compiler is written in Visual Basic and is available on GitHub as a part of the .NET Compiler Platform. The creation of open-source tools for Visual Basic development has been slow compared to C#, although the Mono development platform provides an implementation of Visual Basic-specific libraries and a Visual Basic 2005 compatible compiler written in Visual Basic, as well as standard framework libraries such as Windows Forms GUI library.

MonoDevelop is an open-source alternative IDE. The Gambas environment is also similar but distinct from Visual Basic, as is the Visual FB Editor for FreeBasic.

History of programming languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages

The history of programming languages spans from documentation of early mechanical computers to modern tools for software development. Early programming languages were highly specialized, relying on mathematical notation and similarly obscure syntax. Throughout the 20th century, research in compiler theory led to the creation of high-level programming languages, which use a more accessible syntax to communicate instructions.

The first high-level programming language was Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. The first high-level language to have an associated compiler was created by Corrado Böhm in 1951, for his PhD thesis. The first commercially available language was FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), developed in 1956 (first manual appeared in 1956, but first developed in 1954) by a team led by John Backus at IBM.

Early history

During 1842–1849, Ada Lovelace translated the memoir of Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea about Charles Babbage's newest proposed machine: the Analytical Engine; she supplemented the memoir with notes that specified in detail a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the engine, recognized by most of historians as the world's first published computer program.

The first computer codes were specialized for their applications: e.g., Alonzo Church was able to express the lambda calculus in a formulaic way and the Turing machine was an abstraction of the operation of a tape-marking machine.

Jacquard Looms and Charles Babbage's Difference Engine both had simple languages for describing the actions that these machines should perform hence they were the creators of the first programming language.

First programming languages

In the 1940s, the first recognizably modern electrically powered computers were created. The limited speed and memory capacity forced programmers to write hand-tuned assembly language programs. It was eventually realized that programming in assembly language required a great deal of intellectual effort.

An early proposal for a high-level programming language was Plankalkül, developed by Konrad Zuse for his Z1 computer between 1942 and 1945 but not implemented at the time.

The first functioning programming languages designed to communicate instructions to a computer were written in the early 1950s. John Mauchly's Short Code, proposed in 1949, was one of the first high-level languages ever developed for an electronic computer. Unlike machine code, Short Code statements represented mathematical expressions in understandable form. However, the program had to be interpreted into machine code every time it ran, making the process much slower than running the equivalent machine code.

In the early 1950s, Alick Glennie developed Autocode, possibly the first compiled programming language, at the University of Manchester. In 1954, a second iteration of the language, known as the "Mark 1 Autocode," was developed for the Mark 1 by R. A. Brooker. Brooker, with the University of Manchester, also developed an autocode for the Ferranti Mercury in the 1950s. The version for the EDSAC 2 was devised by Douglas Hartree of University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in 1961. Known as EDSAC 2 Autocode, it was a straight development from Mercury Autocode adapted for local circumstances and was noted for its object code optimization and source-language diagnostics which were advanced for the time. A contemporary but separate thread of development, Atlas Autocode was developed for the University of Manchester Atlas 1 machine.

In 1954, FORTRAN was invented at IBM by a team led by John Backus; it was the first widely used high-level general purpose language to have a functional implementation, in contrast to only a design on paper. When FORTRAN was first introduced, it was viewed with skepticism due to bugs, delays in development, and the comparative efficiency of "hand-coded" programs written in assembly. However, in a hardware market that was rapidly evolving; the language eventually became known for its efficiency. It is still a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's TOP500 fastest supercomputers.

Another early programming language was devised by Grace Hopper in the US, named FLOW-MATIC. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand during the period from 1955 until 1959. Hopper found that business data processing customers were uncomfortable with mathematical notation, and in early 1955, she and her team wrote a specification for an English language programming language and implemented a prototype. The FLOW-MATIC compiler became publicly available in early 1958 and was substantially complete in 1959. Flow-Matic was a major influence in the design of COBOL, since only it and its direct descendant AIMACO were in use at the time.

Other languages still in use today include LISP (1958), invented by John McCarthy and COBOL (1959), created by the Short Range Committee. Another milestone in the late 1950s was the publication, by a committee of American and European computer scientists, of "a new language for algorithms"; the ALGOL 60 Report (the "ALGOrithmic Language"). This report consolidated many ideas circulating at the time and featured three key language innovations:

• nested block structure: code sequences and associated declarations could be grouped into blocks without having to be turned into separate, explicitly named procedures;
• lexical scoping: a block could have its own private variables, procedures and functions, invisible to code outside that block, that is, information hiding.

Another innovation, related to this, was in how the language was described:

• a mathematically exact notation, Backus–Naur form (BNF), was used to describe the language's syntax. Nearly all subsequent programming languages have used a variant of BNF to describe the context-free portion of their syntax.

ALGOL 60 was particularly influential in the design of later languages, some of which soon became more popular. The Burroughs large systems were designed to be programmed in an extended subset of ALGOL.

ALGOL's key ideas were continued, producing ALGOL 68:

• syntax and semantics became even more orthogonal, with anonymous routines, a recursive typing system with higher-order functions, etc.;
• not only the context-free part, but the full language syntax and semantics were defined formally, in terms of Van Wijngaarden grammar, a formalism designed specifically for this purpose.

ALGOL 68's many little-used language features (for example, concurrent and parallel blocks) and its complex system of syntactic shortcuts and automatic type coercions made it unpopular with implementers and gained it a reputation of being difficult. Niklaus Wirth actually walked out of the design committee to create the simpler Pascal language.

Fortran

Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:

• 1951 – Regional Assembly Language
• 1952 – Autocode
• 1954 – IPL (forerunner to LISP)
• 1955 – FLOW-MATIC (led to COBOL)
• 1957 – FORTRAN (first compiler)
• 1957 – COMTRAN (precursor to COBOL)
• 1958 – LISP
• 1958 – ALGOL 58
• 1959 – FACT (forerunner to COBOL)
• 1959 – COBOL
• 1959 – RPG
• 1960 – ALGOL 60
• 1962 – APL
• 1962 – Simula
• 1962 – SNOBOL
• 1963 – CPL (forerunner to C)
• 1964 – Speakeasy
• 1964 – BASIC
• 1964 – PL/I
• 1966 – JOSS
• 1966 – MUMPS
• 1967 – BCPL (forerunner to C)
• 1967 – Logo (an educational language that later influenced Smalltalk and Scratch).

Establishing fundamental paradigms

Scheme

The period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s brought a major flowering of programming languages. Most of the major language paradigms now in use were invented in this period:

• Speakeasy, developed in 1964 at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) by Stanley Cohen, is an object-oriented programming system (OOPS), much like the later MATLAB, IDL and Mathematica numerical package. Speakeasy has a clear Fortran foundation syntax. It first addressed efficient physics computing internally at ANL, was modified for research use (as "Modeleasy") for the Federal Reserve Board in the early 1970s and then was made available commercially; Speakeasy and Modeleasy are still in use.
• Simula, invented in the late 1960s by Nygaard and Dahl as a superset of ALGOL 60, was the first language designed to support object-oriented programming.
• FORTH, the earliest concatenative programming language was designed by Charles Moore in 1969 as a personal development system while at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).
• C, an early systems programming language, was developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs between 1969 and 1973.
• Smalltalk (mid-1970s) provided a complete ground-up design of an object-oriented language.
• Prolog, designed in 1972 by Alain Colmerauer, Phillipe Roussel, and Robert Kowalski, was the first logic programming language.
• ML built a polymorphic type system (invented by Robin Milner in 1973) on Lisp, pioneering statically-typed functional programming languages. Each of these languages spawned an entire family of descendants, and most modern languages count at least one of them in their ancestry.

The 1960s and 1970s also saw considerable debate over the merits of "structured programming", which essentially meant programming without the use of goto. A significant fraction of programmers believed that, even in languages that provide goto, it is bad programming style to use it except in rare circumstances. This debate was closely related to language design: some languages had no goto, which forced the use of structured programming.

To provide even faster compile times, some languages were structured for "one-pass compilers" which expect subordinate routines to be defined first, as with Pascal, where the main routine, or driver function, is the final section of the program listing.

Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:

• 1967 – BCPL (forerunner to B)
• 1968 – Logo
• 1969 – B (forerunner to C)
• 1970 – Pascal
• 1970 – Forth
• 1972 – C
• 1972 – Smalltalk
• 1972 – Prolog
• 1973 – ML
• 1975 – Scheme
• 1978 – SQL (a query language, later extended)

1980s: consolidation, modules, performance

Logos

MATLAB

 

Erlang

 

Tcl

The 1980s were years of relative consolidation in imperative languages. Rather than inventing new paradigms, all of these movements elaborated upon the ideas invented in the previous decade. C++ combined object-oriented and systems programming. The United States government standardized Ada, a systems programming language intended for use by defense contractors. In Japan and elsewhere, vast sums were spent investigating so-called fifth-generation programming languages that incorporated logic programming constructs. The functional languages community moved to standardize ML and Lisp. Research in Miranda, a functional language with lazy evaluation, began to take hold in this decade.

One important new trend in language design was an increased focus on programming for large-scale systems through the use of modules, or large-scale organizational units of code. Modula, Ada, and ML all developed notable module systems in the 1980s. Module systems were often wedded to generic programming constructs: generics being, in essence, parametrized modules (see also polymorphism in object-oriented programming).

Although major new paradigms for imperative programming languages did not appear, many researchers expanded on the ideas of prior languages and adapted them to new contexts. For example, the languages of the Argus and Emerald systems adapted object-oriented programming to distributed computing systems.

The 1980s also brought advances in programming language implementation. The reduced instruction set computer (RISC) movement in computer architecture postulated that hardware should be designed for compilers rather than for human assembly programmers. Aided by central processing unit (CPU) speed improvements that enabled increasingly aggressive compiling methods, the RISC movement sparked greater interest in compiler technology for high-level languages.

Language technology continued along these lines well into the 1990s.

Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:

• 1980 – C++ (as C with classes, renamed in 1983)
• 1983 – Ada
• 1984 – Common Lisp
• 1984 – MATLAB
• 1984 – dBase III, dBase III Plus (Clipper and FoxPro as FoxBASE)
• 1985 – Eiffel
• 1986 – Objective-C
• 1986 – LabVIEW (visual programming language)
• 1986 – Erlang
• 1987 – Perl
• 1988 – PIC (markup language)
• 1988 – Tcl
• 1988 – Wolfram Language (as part of Mathematica, only got a separate name in June 2013)
• 1989 – FL (Backus)

1990s: the Internet age

Logos

Haskell

 

Lua

 

PHP

 

Rebol

The rapid growth of the Internet in the mid-1990s was the next major historic event in programming languages. By opening up a radically new platform for computer systems, the Internet created an opportunity for new languages to be adopted. In particular, the JavaScript programming language rose to popularity because of its early integration with the Netscape Navigator web browser. Various other scripting languages achieved widespread use in developing customized applications for web servers such as PHP. The 1990s saw no fundamental novelty in imperative languages, but much recombination and maturation of old ideas. This era began the spread of functional languages. A big driving philosophy was programmer productivity. Many rapid application development (RAD) languages emerged, which usually came with an integrated development environment (IDE), garbage collection, and were descendants of older languages. All such languages were object-oriented. These included Object Pascal, Objective Caml (renamed OCaml), Visual Basic, and Java. Java in particular received much attention.

More radical and innovative than the RAD languages were the new scripting languages. These did not directly descend from other languages and featured new syntaxes and more liberal incorporation of features. Many consider these scripting languages to be more productive than even the RAD languages, but often because of choices that make small programs simpler but large programs more difficult to write and maintain. Nevertheless, scripting languages came to be the most prominent ones used in connection with the Web.

Some notable languages that were developed in this period include:

• 1990 – Haskell
• 1990 – Python
• 1991 – Visual Basic
• 1993 – Lua
• 1993 – R
• 1994 – CLOS (part of ANSI Common Lisp)
• 1995 – Ruby
• 1995 – Ada 95
• 1995 – Java
• 1995 – Delphi (Object Pascal)
• 1995 – JavaScript
• 1995 – PHP
• 1996 – OCaml
• 1997 – Rebol

Current trends

Programming language evolution continues, in both industry and research. Some of the recent trends have included:

Logos

D

 

Groovy

 

PowerShell

 

Rust

 

Scratch

• Increasing support for functional programming in mainstream languages used commercially, including purely functional programming for making code easier to reason about and to parallelize (at both micro- and macro- levels)
• Constructs to support concurrent and distributed programming.
• Mechanisms for adding security and reliability verification to the language: extended static checking, dependent typing, information flow control, static thread safety.
• Alternative mechanisms for composability and modularity: mixins, traits, typeclasses, delegates, aspects.
• Component-oriented software development.
• Metaprogramming, reflection or access to the abstract syntax tree
  • AOP or Aspect Oriented Programming allowing developers to insert code in another module or class at "join points"
  • Domain-specific languages and code generation
    • XML for graphical interface (XUL, Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML))
• Increased interest in distribution and mobility.
• Integration with databases, including XML and relational databases.
• Open source as a developmental philosophy for languages, including the GNU Compiler Collection and languages such as PHP, Python, Ruby, and Scala.
• More interest in visual programming languages like Scratch, LabVIEW, and PWCT
• Massively parallel languages for GPU graphics processing units and supercomputer arrays, including OpenCL
• Early research into quantum computing programming languages (see list)
• Early research in applying artificial intelligence (AI) methods to generate code using AI like using GPT-3

Some notable languages developed during this period include:

• 2000 – ActionScript
• 2001 – C#
• 2001 – D
• 2002 – Scratch
• 2003 – Groovy
• 2003 – Scala
• 2005 – F#
• 2005 – HolyC
• 2006 – PowerShell
• 2007 – Clojure
• 2008 – Nim
• 2009 – Go
• 2010 – Rust
• 2011 – Dart
• 2011 – Kotlin
• 2012 – Julia
• 2012 – TypeScript
• 2012 – Elm
• 2012 – Elixir
• 2014 – Swift
• 2015 – Raku
• 2019 – Bosque
• 2021 – Microsoft Power Fx

Other new programming languages include Red, Crystal, Hack, Haxe, Zig, and Reason.

Key figures

Some innovators

Dennis Ritchie

 

Niklaus Wirth

 

Grace M. Hopper

 

Bjarne Stroustrup

 

Anders Hejlsberg

 

Guido van Rossum

 

Yukihiro Matsumoto

Some key people who helped develop programming languages:

• Ada Lovelace, published first computer program
• Alan Cooper, developer of Visual Basic.
• Alan Kay, pioneering work on object-oriented programming, and originator of Smalltalk.
• Anders Hejlsberg, developer of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript.
• Arthur Whitney, developer of A+, k, and q.
• Bertrand Meyer, inventor of Eiffel.
• Bjarne Stroustrup, developer of C++.
• Brad Cox, co-creator of Objective-C.
• Brendan Eich, developer of JavaScript.
• Brian Kernighan, co-author of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie, coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages.
• Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, the first concatenative programming language, and a prominent name in stack machine microprocessor design.
• Chris Lattner, creator of Swift and LLVM.
• Cleve Moler, creator of MATLAB.
• Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C. Unix Operating System, Plan 9 Operating System.
• Douglas McIlroy, influenced and designed such languages as SNOBOL, TRAC, PL/I, ALTRAN, TMG and C++.
• Grace Hopper, first to use the term compiler and developer of FLOW-MATIC, influenced development of COBOL. Popularized machine-independent programming languages and the term "debugging".
• Guido van Rossum, creator of Python.
• James Gosling, lead developer of Java and its precursor, Oak.
• Jean Ichbiah, chief designer of Ada, Ada 83.
• Jean-Yves Girard, co-inventor of the polymorphic lambda calculus (System F).
• Jeff Bezanson, main designer, and one of the core developers of Julia.
• Jeffrey Snover, inventor of PowerShell.
• Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang.
• John Backus, inventor of Fortran, cooperated in designing ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60.
• John C. Reynolds, co-inventor of the polymorphic lambda calculus (System F).
• John McCarthy, inventor of LISP, design committee of ALGOL 60.
• John von Neumann, originator of the operating system concept.
• Graydon Hoare, inventor of Rust.
• Ken Thompson, inventor of B, Go, Inferno (operating system), and Unix Operating System co-author.
• Kenneth E. Iverson, developer of APL, co-developer of J with Roger Hui.
• Konrad Zuse, designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül (which influenced ALGOL 58).
• Kristen Nygaard, pioneered object-oriented programming, co-invented Simula.
• Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language (see Perl and Raku).
• Martin Odersky, creator of Scala, and previously a contributor to the design of Java.
• Martin Richards developed the BCPL programming language, forerunner of the B and C languages.
• Nathaniel Rochester, inventor of first assembler (IBM 701).
• Niklaus Wirth, inventor of Pascal, Modula and Oberon.
• Ole-Johan Dahl, pioneered object-oriented programming, co-invented Simula.
• Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP.
• Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure.
• Jean Paoli, co-creater of XML
• Robert Gentleman, co-creator of R.
• Robert Griesemer, co-creator of Go.
• Robin Milner, inventor of ML, and sharing credit for Hindley–Milner polymorphic type inference.
• Rob Pike, co-creator of Go, Inferno (operating system) and Plan 9 (operating system) Operating System co-author.
• Ross Ihaka, co-creator of R.
• Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js.
• Stanley Cohen, inventor of Speakeasy, which was created with an OOPS, object-oriented programming system, the first instance, in 1964.
• Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica.
• Terry A. Davis, creator of HolyC.
• Walter Bright, creator of D.
• Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby.