Hi, you're listening to Cultivate
Curiosity, a.
Podcast that inspires the next generation
to stay curious.
Cultivate Curiosity is brought to you by
the Emerald Coast Science Center, a
nonprofit.
Interactive science museum and steam
educational facility in Fort Walton Beach,
Florida.
This podcast is perfect for anyone curious
about the world we live in, because.
You never know what we'll talk about
next.
Hi.
My name is Diane and I'm the
director at the Emerald Coast Science
Center.
Hi, my name's Harley, and am the
community affairs coordinator and educator
here at the Science Center.
And hi, my name is Jacie, and
I'm the social media coordinator here at
the Science Center. And today we're going
to be talking about a brief history
of coding. So this week, September 14
through 20th, is National Coding Week, a
week intended to help adults improve their
digital literacy to fill the growing
skills gap in the country. But what
is coding, and where did it begin?
Coding is the process of using a
programming language to get a computer to
behave the way we want it to.
Every line of code tells our machines
to do something. A document full of
lines is called a script, which is
designed to carry out a specific job
on the computer. The history of
programming languages spans from
documentation of early mechanical
computers to modern tools for software
development. Early programming languages
were highly specialized, relying on
mathematical notation and similarly
obscure syntax. Throughout the 20th
century, research in Compiler theory led
to the creation of high level programming
languages, which use a more accessible
syntax to communicate instructions.
So I'd like to introduce you to
Charles Babbage, who we also have a
snake at the Science Center named Babbage.
My favorite.
Oh, yes. And of course, he's named
after Charles Babbage. So let's get into
who Charles Babbage is. He was an
English mathematician considered by some
to be the father of computers. He
invented the first mechanical computer,
the Difference Engine, and eventually led
to more complex electronic designs. Though
all the essential ideas of modern
computers are to be found in Babbage's
Analytical Engine, programmed to use a
principle openly barred from the Juckard
Loom. So if you remember, a juckard
loom is how they would design tapestries
and create fabrics. He passed away before
the complete, successful engineering of
many of his designs, including his
Difference Engine and his Analytical
Engine, but remains a prominent figure in
the ideating of computing. And I don't
know if you guys are too young,
but there used to be a store
in Santa Rosa Mall that was called
Babbages, and Babbages was a computer
store, so you could go there and
buy, like, DVDs and computer games for
your Nintendo's or whatever. So it's been
a long, long time.
I think the only thing like that
is Fye now.
Okay, so that Babbage was, like, probably
the early version of the GameStop.
GameStop, yes. And we did have a
Babbages here in the mall, if I
remember correctly.
That's a cuter name than GameStop. It's
clearer.
Yeah, well, I think that it was
just to honor Charles Babbage and his
contemporary and colleague was Ada
Lovelace. And we also have a snake
named Lovelace here. Babbage is a corn
snake. Lovelace is a rat snake. But
Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician
and writer who introduced many computer
concepts during the 1840s and is generally
considered the first computer programmer.
Between 1842 and 1843, Ada translated an
article by the military engineer Luigi
Menabrea about the Analytical Engine,
supplementing with an elaborate set of
seven notes, simply called notes. Ada's
notes are important in the early history
of computers, especially since the 7th
contain what many consider to be the
first computer program, that is, an
algorithm designed to be carried out by
a machine. She also devised a vision
of the capability of computers to go
beyond mere calculating or number
crunching, while many others, including
Charles Babbage, focused only on those
capabilities. Her mindset of poetical
science led her to ask questions about
the Analytical Engine. Examining how
individuals in society relate to
technology as a collaborative tool. She
predicted that one day the theoretical
computer would be able to play music
as well as chess, which did come
true. The programming language Ada is
honorably named after her 100 years later,
in the 1940s, the first recognizably
modern electrically powered computers were
created. The limited speed and memory
capability forced programmers to write
hand tuned assembly language programs. It
was eventually realized that the
programming in assembly language required
a great deal of intellectual effort. An
early proposal for a high level
programming language was called Planka
Cool, developed by Conrad Zitz for his
Z One computer between 1942 and 45,
but it was not implemented at the
time. The first functioning programming
language designed to communicate
instructions to a computer was written in
the early 1950s. John Mauchi's short code,
proposed in 1949, was one of the
first high level languages ever developed
for an electronic computer. Unlike machine
code, short code statements represented
mathematical expressions in understandable
form. However, the program had to be
interpreted into machine code every time
it ran, making the process much slower
than running the equivalent machine code.
So now we are in 1954 and
the company Holorith formed what would one
day evolve into international business
machines, the IBM. IBM gave birth to
the first ever high level programming
language when a team led by John
Bacchus invented Fortran, which is formula
translation. Fortran was originally
developed for scientific and engineering
programs. When it was introduced, it was
viewed with skepticism due to bugs, delays
in development and the comparative
efficiency of hand coded programs written
in assembly. However, in a hardware market
that was rapidly evolving, the language
eventually became known for its
efficiency. It is still used to this
day. This programming language gave way to
many of the higher level once modern
programmers use now, such as HTML and
c, another early programming language was
devised by Grace Hopper in the US.
Named Flowmatic. It was developed for the
UNIVAC one at Remington Rand during the
period from 1955 until 1959. Hopper found
that business data processing customers
were uncomfortable with mathematical
notation, and in early 1955 she and
her team wrote a specification for an
English language programming language and
implemented a prototype. The Flowmatic
compiler became publicly available in
early 1958 and was substantially complete
in 1959. Flowmatic was a major influence
in the design of Cobalt, since only
it and its direct descendant Amaco were
in use at the time. The period
from the late 1960s to the late
1970s brought a major flowering of
programming languages. There's tons of
languages as well, so this is just
a few of them. Most of the
major languages paradigms now in use were
invented in this period. This includes
Speakeasy Simula, fourth C, which is the
best one. So I hear small talk,
prologue and ML. This time period also
saw the considerable debate over the
merits of structured programming, which
essentially meant programming with the use
of Godo. A significant fraction of
programmers believed that even in
languages that provided Godo, it is a
bad programming style to use except in
rare circumstances. Now we're in the 1980s
and the 1980s were years of relative
consolidation in imperative languages
rather than inventing new paradigms. All
of these movements elaborated upon the
ideas invented in the previous decade. C
Plus Plus combines object oriented and
systems programming. The US government
standardized Ada, a systems programming
language intended to be used by defense
contractors. One important new trend in
language design was an increased focus on
programming for large scale systems
through the use of modules or large
scale organizational units of code. This
time period also brought advances in
programming language implementation. The
Reduce Instruction Set Computer or RISC or
Risk Movement in Computer Architecture
postulated that hardware should be
designed for compilers rather than for
human assembly programs, aided by central
processing unit or CPU speed improvements
that enabled increasingly aggressive
compiling methods. The risk movements
sparked greater interest in compiler
technology for high level languages, and.
Then the Internet happened. So the rapid
growth of the Internet in the mid
1990s was the next major historical event
in programming languages. By opening up a
radically new platform for computer
systems, the Internet created an
opportunity for new languages to be
adopted. In particular, the JavaScript
programming language rose to popularity
because of its early integration with
Netscape Navigator web browser. Various
other scripting languages achieved
widespread use in developing customized
applications for web servers such as PHP.
This era began the spread of functional
languages. Many rapid application
development or Rid languages emerged,
which usually came with an integrated
development environment or Ide, a garbage
collection and were descendants of older
languages. Programming language of
evolution continues both in the industry
and in research. Some of these recent
trends include component oriented software
development, integration with databases,
open source as a developmental philosophy
for languages, more interest in visual
programming languages, and more. Now,
coding is a language that is increasingly
important for young people and adults to
understand in the globalized world. It can
be an intimidating project, which means
National Coding Week is the time to
help people understand coding and its
importance. If you want to learn more
about coding, we highly recommend checking
out Codecademy. Since 2011, they have
offered free online coding courses you can
take to unlock your coding skills. You
can visit www.codecademy.com to learn
more.
Okay, so I'm going to show my
age right now. I remember as a
little kid, my dad worked at a
bank and he did the It for
the bank. So this would have been
early 70s when my dad had one
of the first really big IBM computers.
These were great big, huge mainframe
computers. They took a whole entire room.
So my dad would work during the
day and he'd come home at night
and have dinner, and then he'd grab
me and take me back up to
the bank with him so that he
could run the punch cards through the
computer. And her name was Big Bertha,
that's what they called her. She had
the whole room to herself. It was
crazy cold in there. And now even
still rooms that maintain big computers do
have to be kept very, very cool
so the computers don't overheat. But I
can remember as a little kid watching
those punch cards just flying through the
sorters, and then every so often it
would might spit one out. And then
my dad would always give us the
old used punch cards, and we would
come home and we would color on
them and do arts and crafts with
the old punch cards. But I can
remember those days, so it has come
a really long way. And speaking of
punch cards, we have in our gift
shop a series of jewelry that is
based on women in science. And there's
the Ada lovelace. One is actually little
silver punch card earrings. These are so
cute. I wore them before and I
was in like, Harbor Freight or something,
and they're like, oh, your earrings are
really cute. And I'm like, hang on,
I got a story that goes with
these. And I had to go in
the whole thing about punch cards and
Ada Lovelace and all of this other
stuff. And I'm sure they're going okay,
but no, it
was really sweet because they're like,
that's great. I love that there's a
story that goes with the earrings as
well. So I did want to also
bring up that right now the Congressional
App Challenge is open. And this is
where if your congressman and our
congressman here in our area has opted
to participate in this program, that it
is a challenge for students that they
can create an app and then they
can win prizes and stuff. So if
you are interested in it, you have
to submit your app anytime before November
1, and the website is
soto.house.gov/appchallenge
and we'll link it, so that way.
Okay. Yeah. Great.
And I'm sure you could probably, if
you're not in this area, type in
that same website and see if it's
in your area.
Yeah, if you're congressman. So it's
available to anyone. It's like the House
of Representatives are the ones that put
this on. That is really cool, I
think. Any other thoughts on coding let
me go code right now.
Well, this one was a little bit
short, but we just wanted to briefly
touch on the topic of coding for
National Coding Week. So we will see
you guys in two weeks. Thank you
for listening to our podcast.
Thank you.
Bye.
Thanks for listening to this week's
episode of Cultivate Curiosity.
If you have any questions, feel free
to email us at socialmedia@ecscience.org.
Tune in for our next episode in
two weeks.