ABSTRACT
The language Algol, perhaps best known as the direct ancestor of many of most popular languages, began as the product of a joint committee of European and American Computer Scientists in 1958. Another language from the 1950s, COBOL, emerged to support business and finance applications. Fortran debuted in the mid-1950s as an “automatic coding system”—automatic in the sense that programmers did not have to write their own machine code: the system created it from a specification. It is best known for its English-like syntax, a large number of reserved words, and its use of the new record type. Simula was originally developed as a vehicle for writing simulations, a design goal its authors ultimately satisfied with classes, objects, inheritance, and coroutines. It is considered to be the first object oriented programming language. Its influence on its better-known immediate object-oriented descendants, Smalltalk and C++, is difficult to overstate.
