Clean Coder

Languages have evolved quite a bit over the years. The early evolution from machine language to assembler was necessary and obvious. The evolution from assembler to Fortran and Basic was also necessary and obvious. We might even say that the evolution of COBOL was predictable, if not entirely necessary.

Let’s look at just one thread through that evolution:

1946 1949 1958 1960 1966 1967 1970 1972 1980 2009 Binary -> Asm -> ALGOL58 -> ALGOL60 -> CPL -> BCPL -> B -> C -> C++ -> Go

What drove all these steps Why was Algol58 not good enough? Or BCPL? Or B?

One factor, of course, is that we were just starting to learn about computer languages at that time. It was difficult to separate the language from the architecture of the machine. You can see the architecture of the hardware peeking out ever

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