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Programming Language Resources

This page contains links to various programming language resources.
NOTE that all external links point to other websites that are (of course) not affiliated in any way with this site.

Ada

Originally developed for the American Department of Defense (DoD), Ada has been very successful in many areas, in embedded systems for the control of rockets, satellites, spacecraft and airplanes, as well as in administration and business software. Ada directly supports parallel programming via tasks and protected types, plus the limitation of value ranges for data types, which makes it unbeatable for the development of error reduced or error free software. Visit Ada Power, Ada World, Peter Hermann’s Ada Resources, and Ada Home for more information.

BCPL

BCPL is a language for systems programming and the development of portable software that existed already since the 1960ies. BCPL is the direct ancestor language of B and hence C. BCPL was developed by Martin Richards at Cambridge University UK and the BCPL compiler was portable right from the very beginning and generated code akin to virtual machine code, that was either interpreted or that could be translated further. Thus, BCPL was the first language to have a virtual machine. This advantage was thrown overboard by Ken Thompson when he made C a native implementation, out of resource constraints. You can find the homepage of Martin Richards here. There you can find information about BCPL, MCPL and other projects of Richards.

C++

Visit the page of Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of the C++ programming language. C++ has changed the world of software development like few others since the 1980ies.

Java

A programming language that has improved a lot, especially since 1995. Java has become the de-facto programming language for portable or cross-platform software development (despite C# and Mono are catching up). Originally invented as Oak for the programming of laundry machines, Java became the programming language for multi-tier cross-platform enterprise services. Java contains many aspects that foster object-oriented software development. Visit the Java homepage to get an impression of Java and download current development environments (like the wonderful Netbeans IDE).

JavaScript

JavaScript is a very powerful programming language that has been standardized as ECMAScript (see Wiki or ECMA pages for related standards). JavaScript has nothing to do with Java. It most famously known as the scripting language used in Web browsers. But few people using it for the Web realize its true power. It is object-oriented, prototype-based and supports closures. JavaScript interpreters like Tamarin can be included in applications to make them scriptable, just like with Tcl, REXX, and a few others.

Oberon

Niklaus Wirth had enormous influence on the development of low error and precisely defined software with his languages Pascal, Modula and Oberon. These languages have bettered the programming style of many. Here you can find the homepage of Oberon at the ETH in Zurich. Pascal and Modula had a notable influence on the design of the Ada programming language, by the way.

Occam

In the 1980ies, the programming language Occam was developed for the programming of so-called transputers that were supposed to be the successor of contemporary computer technology. Transputers were arbitrarily networked processors. Occam allows the programming of parallel instruction runs over sequential and parallel program execution as well as communication via channels. Visit the Occam archive.

Perl

Developed by Larry Wall, Perl has been successful worldwide, not only as a scripting language. Perl is ideal to analyze and/or maintain large amounts of text, but is also suitable for many other purposes. With Perl/Tk for instance it’s possible to develop graphical user interfaces in a platform independent manner. Perl also supports object-oriented programming. Visit the Perl directory to get more information on Perl. also visit the Perl central at O’Reilly where Larry Wall works.

PHP

PHP rightfully is one of the favorite languages of web developers. It allows to make decisions on the output of web pages right on the server itself and can easily make the use of JavaScript unnecessary. PHP also allows the development of standalone and object-oriented applications. Like Perl, PHP has built-in pattern matching and other interesting features which enables what means a hell lot of work in other programming languages. Visit the PHP homepage.

REBOL

This relatively new programming language was developed by Carl Sassenrath who also developed the EXEC kernel for the famous AmigaOS operating system. REBOL is roughly akin to LISP and similar languages, but it’s meant to be portable and also enables the development of graphical user interfaces and web services directly. Visit the REBOL homepage.

REXX

REXX is one of the best, if not the best programming language for rapid prototyping and fast application development. It is easy to learn (a few minutes is enough) and does away with unnecessary notation. I know REXX from the old Amiga days, but I also enjoyed it on OS/2. From ARexx, I know that writing extensions to REXX is easy. On GNU-based systems like Linux, REXX is also available in the form of the Regina interpreter (which is packaged by Ubuntu and other distros). Visit the REXX Language Association page for more information.