# Programming Language Evolution

DevFeed: [Programming Language Evolution](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/programming-language-evolution-26026.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://elizarov.medium.com/programming-language-evolution-ab7d7d2b0d0b?source=rss-4762e889f8fc------2>)

Author: Roman Elizarov

Published: 2020-11-23T16:18:08Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Stories by Roman Elizarov on Medium](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/stories-by-roman-elizarov-on-medium.md>)

Topics: [Programming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming.md>), [Programming language](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming-language.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>), [Object-oriented programming (OOP)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/oop.md>), [C](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/c.md>), [Java](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/java.md>), [Python](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/python.md>)

Tags: [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [evolution](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/evolution.md>), [history](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/history.md>), [improvements](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/improvements.md>), [language](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/language.md>), [loops](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/loops.md>), [oop](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/oop.md>), [patterns](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/patterns.md>), [pointers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/pointers.md>), [programming](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming.md>), [programming-language](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming-language.md>), [programming-languages](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming-languages.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>)

## AI overview

The article examines how programming languages evolve through gradual improvements that follow changes in programming practice. It uses the transition from GOTOs to structured loops and the adoption of object-oriented patterns, classes, methods, and implicit object references as examples.

## Source excerpt

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash The history of programming languages is ripe with evolution. Existing languages constantly evolve and new languages are created to address the emerging needs. Sometimes there are radical, revolutionary breakthroughs, with a complete paradigm shift, but often there are just gradual improvements and refinements. The latter is the topic of this story. The practice of programming at any given era usually goes ahead of capabilities that programming languages provide, while programming language designers recognize it and catch up to fulfill the demand. Let us see some examples to the point. From GOTOs to the structured code In early languages, you had to write a lot of repetitive code just to do a simple loop. The loop was such a common programming pattern, that it was adopted even by the primitive higher-level languages in the era predating structured programming. So, there was a time when you still had GOTOs in your programming language but a significant fraction of the code had structured loops: 10 LET N=10 20 FOR I=1 TO N 30 PRINT "Hello, World!" 40 NEXT I As we know, the subsequent generation of languages not only added structured IF statements but also made the structure explicit in the source and ended up abolishing GOTOs completely. This kind of evolution can be seen in other areas, too. Objects and pointers Let's take a brief look at OOP. The object-oriented style of programming does not need an object-oriented language. Even nowadays you can find software written in C where methods are just a convention of writing functions whose first parameter is a pointer to the receiver: void Point_move(Point* self, int dx, int dy) { ... } Virtual methods are routinely implemented in pure C, too, explicitly keeping a virtual methods table with references to methods somewhere in the object's structure. However, the rising popularity of object-oriented programming back in the day cemented the growth of languages that incorporated these patterns