Each new coding language has made software development more accessible, more comprehensible, and more usable than what came before.
When Guido van Rossum created Python in the early 1990s, he aimed to replace an existing coding language, called ABC, with a less complex, faster to deploy, easier-to-use alternative.
Python is now the world’s dominant software programming language. And van Rossum’s core principles drive the current boom in low-code application development tools, which allow non-programmers to build powerful business applications and bring them online. “Python comes from that tradition where the intended user is someone whose primary responsibility is not software development or coding, but getting something done,” he says.
It’s a trend that excites tech analysts. Gartner predicts the majority of future enterprise applications will be built by citizen developers rather than professional coders.
Low code is the latest example of a trend that dates back to the early days of computing. Over the decades, each new coding language has made software development more accessible, more comprehensible, and more usable than what came before.
New languages continued this trend toward greater simplicity. COBOL, for Common Business Oriented Language, followed in 1959. COBOL greatly simplified the programming of financial and business applications. In 1964, two Dartmouth College professors invented BASIC to make programming easier for students. Microsoft went on to create multiple versions of the BASIC language, which was so popular by the 1970s that it was installed by default on many of the earliest home computers.
With BASIC came a shift to “syntactical” commands consisting of common words, instead of numerical sequences, that could be reused over and over. The language “C” was developed in 1972 and used simple keywords to tell a computer what to do. In 1987, Larry Wall, a systems administrator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, created Perl, a language designed for programmers with any amount of coding experience. That same year, Apple released HyperCard, which enabled users to build apps using a graphical interface instead of if-then logic statements.
Each new coding language has made software development more accessible, more comprehensible, and more usable than what came before.
With the rise of the internet in the 1990s, new languages appeared that streamlined the creation of websites and web applications. Van Rossum released the earliest version of Python in 1991. Java, released in 1995, underpins Android development at Google and desktop computing at most of the world’s Fortune 500 companies. In a 2021 Workflow article, ServiceNow CIO Chris Bedi wrote: “Each new language reduced the complexity of software development, making the field accessible to more people.”
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