Evolution of Programming
Yet another software engineer coming from a legacy coding background and now working in a trendy coding platform has a handful of things to say on the evolution of Programming. Let’s have a look
The difference of 1:9 ratio line(s) of code was not made possible overnight. Developers of the programming language struggled to ease the work of the developer(business logic) thus the languages evolved.
In the initial Assembly program, the coder has to assign the labels to a specific memory location and also handle the internal registers. You should be mindful about the bits too. The above program can handle only 16-bit numbers and the input should also be provided as such.
Days passed by and its time to take over the world with FORTRAN and then with the KING COBOL.
As you can see, you no more need to specify the memory location, it's handled by COBOL compile, you need to specify the label and the operating statement. But note that we need to specify the label along with data type and data length, In this very example “A PIC 9999” instructs that A can accept only numeric values(denoted by 9) and it can hold only numbers from (0 to 9999), Other denotes are A for Alphabets(Strings) and X (for Alphanumeric).
Cobol ruled the world for decades and it continues in top list to survive the Cloud Computing wave. Meanwhile C, C++ emerged as an open-source programming language that hugely reduced coders' effort by taking care of the data length, It set a trend on how to architecture a language that is still followed even in today’s leading programming languages.
Moreover, the packages (imports) were huge value add, the Open source community held it like a baby and raised it. It was not until 1980 when the mighty python was born but it was 2003 when it hit the sky-high and stays on top 5 on the list until now.
The Simple Syntax attracted newbies, even programmers from different backgrounds adapt to python quickly due to its elegance.
To be specific on our line of the subject, Python eased out to take care of the data type, its memory allocation, and you may be heard it’s called dynamically typed which means the type changes as on when the value changes, Also when 2 labels are assigned to the same value, it shares the same memory space instead of creating a new one, Thanks to the private heap which takes care of these things.
As we can clearly see a programming language takes over its competitor not by a complex design or through better performance, It’s always been simplicity and roubustness.
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