Programming languages have existed in relation with the first computer or

difference engine created by Charles Babbage. Computers have always needed a

method to communicate with the user and programming languages have served
this purpose extensively. There are many programming languages available to learn
and develop, but the most popular ones are C, C++, Java and C#.
These languages have a rich history and strong influences on one another. C forms
the basis of most of the languages we know of now. It was developed by Dennis
Richie in early 1970s while he was working at Bell Laboratories under AT&T. Cs
ancestors are B and BCPL. The highlights of C are that it uses pointers heavily, is
fast and powerful but is often found to be difficult to read. C was used to create
many of the popular OSs we know of today, i.e. MacOS, Windows and Linux.
C was initially developed for the UNIX system that was being created
simultaneously. In between the 1980s and 1970s new type of programming
method was created called Object Oriented Programming, the objects are
considered packages of data which can be manipulated by a coder.
Classes were introduced to C and another branch of the language was created by
Bjarne Stroustroup called C++ introduced in 1983. It was created to use OOP while
being powerful and light as C initially was, it was named to be an increment of C, as
an increment is denoted by
++ in the language. C++ was used in simulations and games, it is powerful today
as it was thirty years ago and is still taught in courses in various universities.
In the 1990s Sun Microsystems felt the need to create a language for Interactive
TV, which failed, but the language lived on and was integrated all over the
internet. Its name is Java and it is now used by several companies and is considered
a good language, even though it is slow and has optimization problems.
All these languages complement the work done by scientists and engineers and
help them make their lives much more efficient and optimal than it would be if they
didnt exist. In Mechanical Engineering we can use these languages to develop
programs for simulations and design and to log data which can be analyzed by the
program rather than by hand. Simulations help us reduce the cost of the production
and testing in real world scenarios. Programming in an engineering field encourages
creativity of ideas and provides freedom and methods to give birth to ideas that
werent even possible. Programming has been called the literacy of the 21 st
Century and rightly so.

Bibliography

Why Scientists and Engineers Must Learn Programming

(http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/166115-why-scientists-and-engineersmust-learn-programming/fulltext) , accessed Sep 2015

The History of Programming Languages

(http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly//news/languageposter_0504.html),
accessed Sep 2015
A History of Computer Programming Languages
(http://cs.brown.edu/~adf/programming_languages.html) , accessed Sep
2015