History of Programming Languages - From 1967 to 1978

During this time period, a major growth in programming languages. Most of the major concepts used in programming languages today were invented in this time period.

1. Simula, invented in the late 1960s by Nygaard and Dahl as a superset of Algol 60, was the first language designed to support object-oriented programming.
   
2. C, an early systems programming language, was developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs between 1969 and 1973.
   
3. Smalltalk (mid 1970s) provided a complete ground-up design of an object-oriented language.
   
4. Prolog, designed in 1972 by Colmerauer, Roussel, and Kowalski, was the first logic programming language.
   
5. ML built a polymorphic type system (invented by Robin Milner in 1973) on top of Lisp, pioneering statically typed functional programming languages.

Every one of these languages spawned a whole list of languages that consider them as part of their ancestry.

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The 1960s and 1970s also saw considerable debate over the merits of "structured programming", which essentially meant programming without the use of Goto. This debate was closely related to language design: some languages did not include GOTO, which forced structured programming on the programmer. Although the debate raged hotly at the time, nearly all programmers now agree that, even in languages that provide GOTO, it is bad programming style to use it except in rare circumstances. As a result, later generations of language designers have found the structured programming debate tedious and even bewildering.

Some important languages that were developed in this period include:

• 1968 - Logo
  
• 1970 - Pascal
  
• 1970 - Forth
  
• 1972 - C
  
• 1972 - Smalltalk
  
• 1972 - Prolog
  
• 1973 - ML
  
• 1975 - Scheme
  
• 1978 - SQL (initially only a query language, later extended with programming constructs)