Things we take for granted today were not so in the past. Early computers had limited and expensive storage, memory, and processing power. People have to go to great lengths to get to the computer lab and stay up all night to get computer time. The naming of programming languages was simpler back then, because namespaces had not yet been developed, and in the 1950s and 1960s, the original programs could have the “luxury” name of exactly what they did: FORTRAN (formula translator), COBOL (business oriented Common Language)), BASIC (General Symbolic Instruction Code for Beginners), ALGOL (Algorithm Language), LISP (List Processor). Most people probably haven’t heard of SNOBOL (String and Symbolic Oriented Language, 1962), but a little guesswork should give you an idea of what it’s trying to do. If there had been more understanding of object-oriented programming concepts in that era, we might have used names like “OBJOL” — explicitly named object-oriented languages, at least according to the naming pattern at the time.
The boldness of PL/I (1964) is worth mentioning and admirable, and its goal was to be “a good programming language”. The name says it all: programming language 1. 2, 3 or 4 should no longer be needed. While PL/I did not become the highland of computer programming that the designers had hoped, they still captured a key question in software: Why are there so many languages? This question has been raised as early as the early 1960s. Today’s programming languages are in many ways like reinventing the wheel, the purpose of inventing so many languages is considered control and wealth , such as in the era of Java language to write multiple platforms at once Microsoft invented C#, it does not require multiple platforms What it needs is to control its own Windows platform.
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