Programming Languages and Paradigms

Programming languages and paradigms

        The rapid growth in innovation and development of technology has made computer science an exciting field to be explore. What was convinced as a tool for larger scale scientific computing during its birth now being used in almost every aspect of life, including planning, designing, medical science, telecommunication, tools for presentation, transportation and a lot more. Behind all these computer activities are the smart brains of programmers who have solved many complex problems and revealed the solutions using high-level instructions. These instructions later are translated to low-level machine instructions. However, these instructions are limited in their expressive power. Because of that, there is clearly a need of a solution to this problem and that is the main reason why the high-level languages exist today.

        Programming languages were developed in a variety of styles which were called as programming paradigm. Computer scientists took a few years analyzing each of the paradigms and finally came out with some drawbacks and it advantages. From there, they started to improve the previous programming styles and evolved another new programming paradigm. The programming styles can be classified into 10 groups which they either have a combination of one or more programming paradigms. The 10 groups are imperative programming, declarative programming, object-oriented programming, concurrent and distributed programming, visual programming, web-based programming, event-based programming, multimedia programming, agent-based programming, and synchronous programming.

Imperative programming paradigm was the first one to be developed in the late 1950s and 1960s. There were four early languages that were quite popular such as FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL and C. FORTRAN is a simple programming language that was easy to learn, suitable for variety of applications, machine independent and allow complex mathematical expressions to be states similarly to regular algebraic notation (1999). Next, ALGOL is known as the modern-day imperative programming languages since most of data abstractions and control abstractions described in ALGOL are still being used today (Bansal, 2014). COBOL is a business programming language and most of the people use it in report writing and handling financial data. C was developed for writing the “UNIX” operating system and it was actually a subset of ALGOL 68. Another programming paradigm is declarative programming. It also has two major types of declarative programming languages which are functional programming languages and logic programming languages. The first type is based on the use of the mathematical function while the other one is based on the use of predicate logic. The examples of declarative programming languages are Lisp, Prolog, Scheme, ML, Miranda, and Haskell.

As the computer’s memory size increased, the programmers designed object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm.  It is a model organized around objects rather than “actions” and data rather than logic (Rouse, 2008). The first object-oriented language was SIMULA in the late 1960s. Later, C++ appeared as an integration of the language C, CLOS as integration of Lisp. Modern-day scripting languages, such as Python, Ruby and PHP, had integrated object-oriented programming from their ancestors. During the decade of 1980, multiple fast processors were becoming available in a single computer. This technology advancement led to the existence of concurrent programming paradigm. This kind of language was designed for execution on multiple processors where more than one processor was used to execute a program or complex of programs running simultaneously. It was also used for programming designed for a multitasking environment (2016). Examples of programming languages that used this paradigm were C, C++, and Java.

Most of the programming languages developed were textual and suffer from this limitation of sequentially caused by the single dimension presented in the textual representation of programs. In the late 1980s, the programmers found a way to overcome the limitation by designing visual programming. Visual programming language is a medium for implementing computer programs that makes uses of graphical operators and elements rather than textual ones (Milicchio et al., 2016). It was used in many sectors of software development, such as education, architecture, and video game design. Another kind of paradigms that is commonly used today is multimedia programming. Multimedia programming paradigm is an integration of multiple modes of visualization, such as text, images, audio, video and gestures. In the real life, there are languages, such as Alice and Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), that create 3D animated objects and motion to model virtual reality. In these recent years, the programmers are working on a few languages such as X3D and Java3D that will integrate computation and 3D modelling (Bansal, 2014).