The Evolution Of Computer Programming: The History Of Programming

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History of Programming There’s a running joke that programmers spend more time automating a task than it takes to actually do the task. This joke has a lot more ground in the history of programming than most people realize. Even before the creation of what computers are currently perceived as, programming and computational thinking were evolving. From punch cards to text documents, computer programming has evolved to make it easier and more user friendly. Throughout computer history, people have been trying to make machines do anything. Machines were made to do complex mathematics; the problem was technology couldn’t make a computer that would do multiple steps. Thus came giant machines made out of pipes and gears and parts straight from …show more content…

While converting binary to letters has always been something that worked, there wasn’t a standardized way of telling what data was what letter so computers printed out different letters on different machines. Each letter or symbol hasd a certain value in binary that the computer recognizes. A problem with this system is that different computer companies might assign different letters or symbols to a binary value that another computer company assigned to something different so, when information travels to another computer, it will read like gibberish (ASCII). That’s where ASCII comes in. Created by IBM, it was meant to standardize what binary value belonged to what symbol. Soon, every computer in the US would use the ASCII guidelines (ASCII). This was the first step to making computer programming easier to decipher. C is what most programming languages and compilers look like today and C++ was just object oriented C. Computer engineers thought that C was so lightweight and easy enough to work with that they created the first ever operating system with it: Unix (Denning 31). Soon, most computers were running Unix and along with it C. The easy to understand interface and color coordination made programming a lot easier to understand. After a while, though, the limitations of C were felt as the industry started expanding. Thus came C++, an addition to C that allowed cross referencing of code, object-oriented

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