Librarians interested in programming languages may wish to read Richard Wexelbladt's History of Programming Languages from Academic Press. Thirteen popular languages are discussed: FORTRAN (the most popular language in the scientific community); COBOL (the first choice of the business community); PL/l (the second choice of the business community and widely adopted by IBM users); BASIC (first choice for micros); and less well known languages such as ALGOL, APT, JOVIAL, LISP, etc.
Not treated are ADA and PASCAL because they did not meet all of the criteria for inclusion: creation before 1968, use for at least 10 years, and influence in shaping the computer industry. Both languages are too new.
The chapters of the book are transcripts of a conference sponsored by the Association for Computer Machinery in 1978.
