How have Programming languages changed over time?

[techboy123]

I am doing extended project and decided to look at "How programming languages have changed over time". After snooping round the internet a little bit, I found out a small bit. However I found little regarding how they actually evolved and started drawing conclusions from various "x vs y" topics. And so I wanted to hear what the opinions/facts people have on these forums.

For example:

-How difficult was it transferring from x to y?
-Did you prefer using the old over the new?
-Why do you think this change happened?

Here's a conclusion I came up with about the change from assembly to C:
"C was a massive step forward in programming, supplying programmers with a standard way to communicate with CPU. On top of the portability; C suffers minimal loss of speed and doesn't consume much more RAM. To the average human being it looked a lot nicer with a more human language syntax. On top of all this some compilers allow 'inline' assembly to be mixed with the code, allowing the programmer to improve where the compiler could have done better."

If you know/think otherwise, please say as I'm very much green in the world of programming (I'm learning C++).


Thanks in advance .

In case you didn't know:
GCEs / A Levels are the UK's rough equivalent of AP (According to some forums; I know nothing about other education systems) and are done at secondary schools(sixthform) or college.
Extended Project is a GCE / A Level course where you come up with a question and carry out research, write a dissertation, and do a presentation (my classmates are gonna 'love' it).

[zeid]

Well I don't much feel like writing an essay on what I've been taught. If you go find a book called, "Concepts of Programming Languages, Eighth Edition" by Robert W. Sebesta you will have a bitch load of info. Discussing most programming languages (Many of which you will never touch or have heard of). Probably more importantly it discusses the features that each language bought to the table or had integrated within it as well as a little history on each one. It also discusses a bunch of other stuff on parse trees and how the runtime stack works which you might wish to skip over as it isn't really what your looking for (And if your just learning to program it will likely break your mind).

If you are doing this as a project mention Plankalkul, as it was a language that is rather interesting in many respects.

Also this will help you a bit.

[techboy123]

Don't worry I wasn't expecting an essay (else i'd be done in for plagiarism ) . Thanks for all the helpful info, I'll be sure to get stuck right in. I just looked up the book you mentioned and luckily google's got a preview copy so im reading that. The chart was also very interesting and will be useful to actually getting a grip when stuff happened without having to go through dozens of pages.