Successful programming languages evolve over time to become more general-purpose, or form the basis for other languages (e.g. '''C''' -> '''C++'''). The evolution often involves incorporating good features from other languages. The general trend is for languages to become more general-purpose and provide more levels of abstraction. The concepts of structured programming were put on a sound theoretical basis in the early 1970's and these have also influenced the evolution of some programming languages (e.g. Fortran 66 -> Fortran 77). The idea of objects (combining data with the applicable operations) was available in Simula in the mid 1960's, but did not become popular until the advent of C++ in the early 1980's and Java in the mid 1990's; confusingly, Java and C++ have a lot of syntax in common, but the meaning (semantics) may differ drastically for what looks the same when written down. | Successful programming languages evolve over time to become more general-purpose, or form the basis for other languages (e.g. '''C''' -> '''C++'''). The evolution often involves incorporating good features from other languages. The general trend is for languages to become more general-purpose and provide more levels of abstraction. The concepts of structured programming were put on a sound theoretical basis in the early 1970's and these have also influenced the evolution of some programming languages (e.g. Fortran 66 -> Fortran 77). The idea of objects (combining data with the applicable operations) was available in Simula in the mid 1960's, but did not become popular until the advent of C++ in the early 1980's and Java in the mid 1990's; confusingly, Java and C++ have a lot of syntax in common, but the meaning (semantics) may differ drastically for what looks the same when written down. |