Programming language theory

Programming language theory is closely related to other fields including mathematics, software engineering, and linguistics.

The first widely known and successful high-level programming language was FORTRAN (Stands for Formula Translation), developed from 1954 to 1957 by a team of IBM researchers led by John Backus.

The success of FORTRAN led to the formation of a committee of scientists to develop a "universal" computer language; the result of their effort was ALGOL 58.

Separately, John McCarthy of MIT developed Lisp, the first language with origins in academia to be successful.

Run-time systems refer to the development of programming language runtime environments and their components, including virtual machines, garbage collection, and foreign function interfaces.

The lowercase Greek letter λ ( lambda ) is an unofficial symbol of the field of programming-language theory. [ citation needed ] This usage derives from the lambda calculus , a model of computation introduced by Alonzo Church in the 1930s and widely used by programming-language researchers. It graces the cover [ 1 ] of the classic text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs , and the title of the so-called Lambda Papers of 1975 to 1980, written by Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy Steele , the developers of the Scheme programming language . [ jargon ]