Evolution of Programming Language

It's the nature of men to invent a better tool to make their life easier. There is no difference in Programming Language (PL). PL is basically a tool for programmer to write a program that can be understood by a computing machine.

I believe the evolution of PL is based on our never ending saga to organize and categorize things. Even a seemingly messy looking table is organaized and categorized in some way in the mind of the owner. The problem is when more than one person own that same table, the same papers, the same pen or pencils, the same note books, etc. then the chaos begin.

The war between programmers (the user of the tool) and the tool maker is also a never-ending.
With increasing complexity requirement, programmers are pushing PL way beyond its intended used. A new tool created to tackle the problem then the cycle begins...

First came Assembly language. The goal was making programmer more productive by using word rather than binary. It's so closed to the hardware that it's seemed you're storing a value to a registry memory by hand or lighting on and off or dimming few pixels on the monitor's coordinate, etc. While it was possible to isolate certain instructions into one unit so it could be reused, it was difficult and error prone for programmer to handle more and more those isolated units when complexity requirement increased. It became clear we need a better tool to write longer and complex program. As you can see Reusabilty is part of the evolution. It wil be one "must have" component in the next generation.

The new tool "Procedural Language" was born. Reusability was the main focus on this tool. The definition of a program as set of instructions was no longer valid. A program was sets of procedures. Procedures could be reused and it was a King in that period of time. It was so reusable, many sets of procedures (called Library or Package) sold to programmers so they didn't have to write the same procedures.

Will be continued...