The 1950s and 1960s saw the development and application of the first
HighLevelLanguages:
CobolLanguage,
FortranLanguage,
LispLanguage and
AlgolLanguage. Of these languages, Lisp and Algol proved to be the most influential for the development of further languages. Lisp and Algol followed rather different paradigms, e.g.
DynamicTyping vs
StaticTyping,
DynamicScoping vs
LexicalScoping, automatic vs
ManualMemoryManagement, incremental/interactive/interpreted development vs batch-compilation, and, of course, syntax. The early implementations/incarnations were specialized to rather different domains of application (roughly, symbolic vs numerical computation) and spawned rather different cultures. Consequently, their close and not so close younger relatives were roughly and rather brutally classified as to belonging to either the
LispFamily or the
AlgolFamily.
This distinction was obsoleted by the emergence of newer
ProgrammingParadigms and a certain amount of cross-fertilization.
The pages
LexicalScoping,
DynamicScoping,
StaticTyping,
DynamicTyping,
GarbageCollection,
EssExpressions explain some of the differences between lispish and algolish languages.
CategoryHistory CategoryProgrammingLanguage