 Branch of computer science |
Programming language theory (PLT) is a branch of computer science that deals with the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of formal languages known as programming languages. Programming language theory is closely related to other fields including linguistics, mathematics, and software engineering.
"Theory of programming" redirects here. For the branch of CS that deals with what problems can be solved, see Theory of computation.
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The articles this one links to most, weighted towards the introduction.
See also: History of programming languages and Programming language § History
In some ways, the history of programming language theory predates even the development of programming languages. The lambda calculus, developed by Alonzo Church and Stephen Cole Kleene in the 1930s, is considered by some to be the world's first programming language, even though it was intended to model computation rather than being a means for programmers to describe algorithms to a computer system. Many modern functional programming languages have been described as providing a "thin veneer" over the lambda calculus,2 and many are described easily in terms of it.
The first programming language to be invented was Plankalkül, which was designed by Konrad Zuse in the 1940s, but not publicly known until 1972, and not implemented until 1998. The first widely known and successful high-level programming language was FORTRAN (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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed Lisp, the first language with origins in academia to be successful. With the success of these initial efforts, programming languages became an active topic of research in the 1960s and beyond.
See also: Timeline of programming languages
Some other key events in the history of programming language theory since then:
Conferences are the primary venue for presenting research in programming languages. The most well known conferences include the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP), the international conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) and the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS).
Notable journals that publish PLT research include the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Journal of Functional Programming (JFP) and Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation.
See also: Programming language § Further reading, and Semantics of programming languages § Further reading
Program analysis is the general problem of examining a program and determining key characteristics (such as the absence of classes of program errors). Program transformation is the process of transforming a program in one form (language) to another form.
Comparative programming language analysis seeks to classify languages into different types based on their characteristics; broad categories of languages are often known as programming paradigms.
Metaprogramming is the generation of higher-order programs which, when executed, produce programs (possibly in a different language, or in a subset of the original language) as a result.
Domain-specific languages are those constructed to efficiently solve problems in a given domain, or part of such.
Further information: Compiler construction
Compiler theory is the theory of writing compilers (or more generally, translators); programs that translate a program written in one language into another form. The actions of a compiler are traditionally broken up into syntax analysis (scanning and parsing), semantic analysis (determining what a program should do), optimization (improving the performance of a program as indicated by some metric; typically execution speed) and code generation (generation and output of an equivalent program in some target language; often the instruction set architecture of a central processing unit (CPU)).
Run-time systems refer to the development of programming language runtime environments and their components, including virtual machines, garbage collection, and foreign function interfaces.
