Design of Software Representation Languages: A Historical Perspective

The history of software development includes numerous textual and graphical ways to represent software structures and the mechanisms for executing high-level instructions. The proliferation of programming languages is a visible outcome of that effort, with many popular languages having a strong association with their creator(s). In this paper, we present a historically focused overview of many different types of software representations, primarily programming languages, but also graphical notations that can generate code in a programming language or be directly executed with associated tools. The paper then describes some of the characteristics that differentiate them from one another, and concludes with a review of guidelines for designing programming languages and notations.