Quiz - Programming Languages

1. Smalltalk: The first version of Smalltalk is deployed at Xerox PARC in 1971. Smalltalk is the first object- oriented programming language with an integrated user interface, overlapping windows, integrated documents, and cut & paste editor.
2. Javascript was released by Sun and Netscape in December 1995. It is a scripting language for browsers based on the Java language. It was originally called LiveScript.
3. Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 because the Unix sed and awk tools (used for text manipulation) were no longer strong enough to support his needs. Perl is an acronym for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Geeks expand it as Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.
4. Forth was introduced by Charles Moore in the early 1970s. It was used to control the submersible sled that located the wreck of the Titanic in 1985.
5. Pascal was written by Niklaus Wirth. Work began in 1968. Wirth also developed Modula (1977), which was intended as a successor to Pascal, and then Modula-2 (1980), and Oberon (1988), which was a successor to Modula-2.
6. Work on LOGO began at Bolt, Beranek, & Newman (BBN) in 1966. The development team was headed by Wally Fuerzig and included Seymour Papert. Logo was best known for its 'turtle graphics'.
7. Java was written by James Gosling, Patrick Naughton, Chris Warth, Ed Frank and Mike Sheridan at Sun Microsystems. They took 18 months for the first working version. It was called Oak at first and then renamed Java, after a brew, in 1995, when it was publicly announced.
8. C++, originally called 'C with classes' was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1979 at Bell Labs.
9. C was invented and first implemented by Dennis Ritchie on a DEC PDP-11 running UNIX in 1970. The predecessors of C were the BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) by Martin Richards and then the B written by Ken Thompson. C was standardised in December 1989 by American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
10. LISP, which is short for LISt Processing, was developed by John McCarthy at MIT. It was released in 1959. LISP 2 appeared in 1966.
11. ALGOL 60 was the first block-structured language. It was introduced in 1960.
12. Kenneth Iverson is responsible for the language APL (A Programming Language), which was released in 1962. It used a specialized character set that required APL-compatible devices.
13. SNOBOL (StriNgent Oriented symBOlic Language) was released in 1962. FASBOL was a compiler for SNOBOL (1971), and SPITBOL (1971) was a SPeedy ImplemenTation of snoBOL. SNOBOL3 was released in 1965 and SNOBOL4 in 1967.
14. BASIC stands for Beginners' All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was invented in 1964 by Thomas E. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny. The first BASIC program was run on May 1, 1964.
15. APL\360 came out in 1964. In 1969, 500 people attended an APL conference at the IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York. This event is sometimes referred to as "The March on Armonk".
16. ALTRAN is a FORTRAN variant which appeared in 1968.
17. COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was defined by the Conference on Data Systems and Languages (CODASYL) in 1959. An ANSI standard for COBOL was introduced in 1968.
18. Work on PL/1 (Programming Language 1) began in 1963 and it was released in 1964.
19. FORTRAN, acronym for FORmula TRANslating system, came in 1957. It was developed by an IBM team headed by John Backus from 1954 onwards. John Backus was later involved in the development of the language ALGOL and also the Backus-Naur Form (BNF), which is a formal notation used to describe the syntax of a given language. FORTRAN II came in 1958. FORTRAN III also came out in 1958, but it was never released to the public. FORTRAN IV was released in 1961. FORTRAN 66, which was a result of standardization by the ASA was released in 1966.
20. A rudimentary compiler called Autocode was developed by Alick E.Glennie in 1952 at the University of Manchester.
21. The first computer language actually used on an electronic computing device was Short Code, which appeared in 1949. It had to be compiled by hand!
22. The language Plankalkul was developed by Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, when he was alone hiding out in the Bavarian Alps. Chess was one area the language was used for.
23. Grace Murray Hopper developed A0 in 1951, which could translate programming code into binary code. Remington Rand, for whom she worked, released it in 1957 as Math-matic.