Programming language history

Question

I'd like to know a little more about the overall development and history of programming. Things like how they came up with syntax and the overall thought process during the design of the older languages that laid the foundation for more modern languages.

I looked through this but didn't seem to find what I was looking for.

Any recommendations for a book on the history of language development?

Thanks in advance

EDIT
Thanks for the book ideas. Should keep me busy for a little bit. If anyone has any more ideas, feel free to add to the list.

Answer 1

The Computer Comes of Age by René Moreau might be useful, though I have not read it myself.

I remember seeing a huge printed version of the history of computer languages. Rather fun to see our roots.

Answer 2

For C++ specifically you can read The Design and Evolution of C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup. He is the creator of the language and talks a lot about the process and the tradeoffs that went into making C++ what it is today.

Answer 3

The classic work on this would be the History of Programming Languages - now in three volumes, I believe. They are published about a decade apart. I only have the first two:

• History of Programming Languages, edited by Richard L Wexelblat, ACM Monograph Series, 1981, ISBN 0-12-745040-8 (Academic Press).
  • Featuring: Fortran, Algol, LISP, COBOL, APT, Jovial, GPSS, Simula, Joss, BASIC, PL/I, SNOBOL, APL.
• History of Programming Languages, Thomas J Bergin and Richard G Gibson, ACM Press Books, 1996, ISBN 0-201-89502-1 (Addison-Wesley).
  • Featuring: Algol 68, Pascal, Monitors and Concurrent Pascal, Ada, LISP, Prolog, Discrete Event Simulation Languages, FORMAC, CLU, Smalltalk, Icon, Forth, C, C++.
• HOPL III conference - San Diego, 2007.
  • Featuring: AppleScript, BETA, C++, Emerald, Erlang, Haskell, High Performance Fortran (HPF), Lua, Modula-2 / Oberon, Self, Statecharts, ZPL

The third conference was in 2007, and featured C++ amongst others. You can find Stroustrup's paper on it at his web site.

See: ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages

Answer 4

Here's a graph of the progression of programming languages, up to 2001. Not many details, but a nice visual.

Answer 5

There is a nice programming language history poster with more details from O'Reilly.

Answer 6

Congratulations! This is a fascinating genre you're entering. Here are a couple of examples I found interesting, recently.

A History of Erlang, by Joe Armstrong

The History of Python, by Guido van Rossum

On a slightly different note, Charles Petzold's The Annotated Turing is a very readable introduction to the early history of computing.

Almost all of the History of Programming Languages papers, which are available via the ACM's Digital Library (subscription), if you have access, are good reads.

Answer 7

See also History of Lisp.

Answer 8

Hope this is useful:

http://www.jaisharma.info/static/choice/images/projects/lineage.svg

Best viewed in Firefox, with ability to jump to the corresponding wikipedia page. The graph is automatically generated from information boxes on programming language pages on wikipedia as described in this post:

http://www.jaisharma.info/2010/02/Programming-language-lineages-graph

All comments are welcome.