hw3. Prof Giselle. Programming Languages

History of Punch Cards

The punch cards, also known as "IBM Cards" (as they were produced by IBM) was one of the
earliest inventions in Computer Science. They had measures of 18.73x8.3 centimetres, and
consisted of 80 columns, 12 rows and groups of tiny rectangular holes. Data in these cards
were created by punching holes, and each hole in each column represented a character. When
writing a program, each card could represent only line of code (around 80 bytes), thus
requiring a very large amount of space. Years later, the company had to come up with
different solution as they were running out of storage space.

Today's Programming Languages

Nowadays, there are lot of programming languages. Each of them has its main purpose, and
some of them are better than others in certain areas. C, C++, or C# are famous for their
speed, thus they are used by game developing companies to make video games for PC and
consoles. JavaScript and PHP are used by web developers to create websites and web
applications. Most of the Android applications were created in Java and Kotlin, while
Apple developed its own programming language Swift to make apps for iOS ecosystem.

I, personally, code in C++. It has been nearly six years and I cannot remember any
drawbacks of using it. Some people complain about it having a syntax very hard to
understand, but I am sure it just takes some time and it is completely worth learning.
The amount of configurations one can make is incredible.

I do not think that I ever create a new programming language, but if I really had to,
I think it would be heavily inspired by C++. I could change the syntax, add some bult-in
functions, so that it would be easier for beginners to learn it.

References

1. https://www.ibm.com/history/punched-card
2. https://medium.com/illumination/why-are-there-so-many-programming-languages-f7d634e45bec
3. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/why-are-there-so-many-programming-languages/