Programming Track Beginnings

Web development requires more than a simple knowledge of networking facts and protocols--it calls for a knowledge of software development. That's why I'm kicking off a branch of research into understanding the origin and development of computer programming!

Here are some initial questions to get this going:

1) What do I need to understand about computer hardware in order to have the concept of software and software development cease to be a black box?
2) Why did software development emerge when and where it did?
3) How do we begin to make sense of the generation and development of programming languages?
4) What are the different kinds of programming languages?
5) How do we understand the relationship between programming languages and the web?
6) What are other good questions to ask?

Here are some initial resources to get this going:

• A visual time-line representing the history of programming languages to the end of 2007
• A companion link-list to descriptions of all the languages in the time-line