Imperative programming
Encyclopedia
In computer science
, imperative programming is a programming paradigm
that describes computation in terms of statements that change a program state
. In much the same way that imperative mood
in natural language
s expresses commands to take action, imperative programs define sequences of commands for the computer to perform.
The term is used in opposition to declarative programming
, which expresses what the program should accomplish without prescribing how to do it in terms of sequences of actions to be taken. Functional
and logical programming are examples of a more declarative approach.
is imperative programming in which the program is built from one or more procedures (also known as subroutine
s or functions). The terms are often used as synonyms, but the use of procedures has a dramatic effect on how imperative programs appear and how they are constructed. Heavily procedural programming, in which state changes are localized to procedures or restricted to explicit arguments and returns from procedures, is known as structured programming
. From the 1960s onwards, structured programming and modular programming
in general, have been promoted as techniques to improve the maintainability
and overall quality of imperative programs. Object-oriented programming
extends this approach.
Procedural programming could be considered as a step towards declarative programming. A programmer can often tell, simply by looking at the names, arguments and return types of procedures (and related comments), what a particular procedure is supposed to do - without necessarily looking at the detail of how the procedure achieves its result. At the same time, a complete program is still imperative since it 'fixes' the statements to be executed and their order of execution to a large extent.
Declarative programming
is a non-imperative style of programming in which programs describe the desired results of the program, without explicitly listing command or steps that need to be carried out to achieve the results. Functional
and logical programming languages are characterized by a declarative programming style.
In a pure functional language, such as Haskell
, all functions are without side effects
, and state changes are only represented as functions that transform the state. Although pure functional languages are non-imperative, they often provide a facility for describing the effect of a function as a series of steps. Other functional languages, such as Lisp, OCaml and Erlang, support a mixture of procedural and functional programming.
In logical programming languages
, programs consist of logical statements, and the program executes by searching for proofs of the statements. As in functional programming languages, some logical programming languages such as Prolog
, and database query languages such as SQL
, while declarative in principle,
also support a procedural style of programming.
Many imperative programming languages (such as Fortran
, BASIC
and C
) were abstraction
s of assembly language
.
is a notable exception nearly all computer hardware is designed to execute machine code
, which is native to the computer, written in the imperative style. From this low-level perspective, the program state is defined by the contents of memory, and the statements are instructions in the native machine language of the computer. Higher-level imperative languages use variable
s and more complex statements, but still follow the same paradigm. Recipe
s and process checklist
s, while not computer program
s, are also familiar concepts that are similar in style to imperative programming; each step is an instruction, and the physical world holds the state. Since the basic ideas of imperative programming are both conceptually familiar and directly embodied in the hardware, most computer languages are in the imperative style.
Assignment statements, in imperative paradigm, perform an operation on information located in memory and store the results in memory for later use. High-level imperative languages, in addition, permit the evaluation
of complex expressions
, which may consist of a combination of arithmetic operations and function
evaluations, and the assignment of the resulting value to memory. Looping statements (such as in while loop
s, do while loop
s and for loop
s) allow a sequence of statements to be executed multiple times. Loops can either execute the statements they contain a predefined number of times, or they can execute them repeatedly until some condition changes. Conditional branching
statements allow a sequence of statements to be executed only if some condition is met. Otherwise, the statements are skipped and the execution sequence continues from the statement following them. Unconditional branching statements allow the execution sequence to be transferred to some other part of the program. These include the jump (called "goto
" in many languages), switch
and the subprogram, or procedure
, call (which usually returns to the next statement after the call)..
s, enabled complex structures to be expressed by hierarchical decomposition into simpler procedural structures.
, developed by John Backus
at IBM starting in 1954, was the first major programming language to remove the obstacles presented by machine code in the creation of complex programs. FORTRAN was a compiled language
that allowed named variables, complex expressions, subprograms, and many other features now common in imperative languages. The next two decades saw the development of a number of other major high-level imperative programming languages. In the late 1950s and 1960s, ALGOL
was developed in order to allow mathematical algorithms to be more easily expressed, and even served as the operating system
's target language for some computers. MUMPS
(1966) carried the Imperative paradigm to a logical extreme, by not having any statements at all, relying purely on commands, even to the extent of having the IF and ELSE commands be independent of each other, and only connected by a intrinsic variable named $TEST. COBOL
(1960) and BASIC
(1964) were both attempts to make programming syntax look more like English. In the 1970s, Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth
, and C
was created by Dennis Ritchie
while he was working at Bell Laboratories. Wirth went on to design Modula-2
, and Oberon. For the needs of the United States Department of Defense
, Jean Ichbiah
and a team at Honeywell
began designing Ada in 1978, after a 4-year project to define the requirements for the language. The specification was first published in 1983, with revisions in 1995 and 2005/6.
The 1980s saw a rapid growth in interest in object-oriented programming
. These languages were imperative in style, but added features to support objects. The last two decades of the 20th century saw the development of a considerable number of such programming languages. Smalltalk-80, originally conceived by Alan Kay
in 1969, was released in 1980 by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Drawing from concepts in another object-oriented language—Simula
(which is considered to be the world's first object-oriented programming language
, developed in the late 1960s)—Bjarne Stroustrup
designed C++
, an object-oriented language based on C
. C++
was first implemented in 1985. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the notable imperative languages drawing on object-oriented concepts were Perl
, released by Larry Wall
in 1987; Python
, released by Guido van Rossum
in 1990; PHP
, released by Rasmus Lerdorf
in 1994; Java
, first released by Sun Microsystems
in 1994 and Ruby
, released in 1995 by Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto. Microsoft's .NET platform (2002) is at its core imperative as are its primary target languages, VB.NET and C#.
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
, imperative programming is a programming paradigm
Programming paradigm
A programming paradigm is a fundamental style of computer programming. Paradigms differ in the concepts and abstractions used to represent the elements of a program and the steps that compose a computation A programming paradigm is a fundamental style of computer programming. (Compare with a...
that describes computation in terms of statements that change a program state
State (computer science)
In computer science and automata theory, a state is a unique configuration of information in a program or machine. It is a concept that occasionally extends into some forms of systems programming such as lexers and parsers....
. In much the same way that imperative mood
Imperative mood
The imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...
in natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
s expresses commands to take action, imperative programs define sequences of commands for the computer to perform.
The term is used in opposition to declarative programming
Declarative programming
In computer science, declarative programming is a programming paradigm that expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow. Many languages applying this style attempt to minimize or eliminate side effects by describing what the program should accomplish, rather than...
, which expresses what the program should accomplish without prescribing how to do it in terms of sequences of actions to be taken. Functional
Functional programming
In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast to the imperative programming style, which emphasizes changes in state...
and logical programming are examples of a more declarative approach.
Imperative, procedural, and declarative programming
Procedural programmingProcedural programming
Procedural programming can sometimes be used as a synonym for imperative programming , but can also refer to a programming paradigm, derived from structured programming, based upon the concept of the procedure call...
is imperative programming in which the program is built from one or more procedures (also known as subroutine
Subroutine
In computer science, a subroutine is a portion of code within a larger program that performs a specific task and is relatively independent of the remaining code....
s or functions). The terms are often used as synonyms, but the use of procedures has a dramatic effect on how imperative programs appear and how they are constructed. Heavily procedural programming, in which state changes are localized to procedures or restricted to explicit arguments and returns from procedures, is known as structured programming
Structured programming
Structured programming is a programming paradigm aimed on improving the clarity, quality, and development time of a computer program by making extensive use of subroutines, block structures and for and while loops - in contrast to using simple tests and jumps such as the goto statement which could...
. From the 1960s onwards, structured programming and modular programming
Modular programming
Modular programming is a software design technique that increases the extent to which software is composed of separate, interchangeable components called modules by breaking down program functions into modules, each of which accomplishes one function and contains everything necessary to accomplish...
in general, have been promoted as techniques to improve the maintainability
Maintainability
In engineering, maintainability is the ease with which a product can be maintained in order to:* isolate defects or their cause* correct defects or their cause* meet new requirements* make future maintenance easier, or* cope with a changed environment...
and overall quality of imperative programs. Object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...
extends this approach.
Procedural programming could be considered as a step towards declarative programming. A programmer can often tell, simply by looking at the names, arguments and return types of procedures (and related comments), what a particular procedure is supposed to do - without necessarily looking at the detail of how the procedure achieves its result. At the same time, a complete program is still imperative since it 'fixes' the statements to be executed and their order of execution to a large extent.
Declarative programming
Declarative programming
In computer science, declarative programming is a programming paradigm that expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow. Many languages applying this style attempt to minimize or eliminate side effects by describing what the program should accomplish, rather than...
is a non-imperative style of programming in which programs describe the desired results of the program, without explicitly listing command or steps that need to be carried out to achieve the results. Functional
Functional programming
In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast to the imperative programming style, which emphasizes changes in state...
and logical programming languages are characterized by a declarative programming style.
In a pure functional language, such as Haskell
Haskell (programming language)
Haskell is a standardized, general-purpose purely functional programming language, with non-strict semantics and strong static typing. It is named after logician Haskell Curry. In Haskell, "a function is a first-class citizen" of the programming language. As a functional programming language, the...
, all functions are without side effects
Pure function
In computer programming, a function may be described as pure if both these statements about the function hold:# The function always evaluates the same result value given the same argument value...
, and state changes are only represented as functions that transform the state. Although pure functional languages are non-imperative, they often provide a facility for describing the effect of a function as a series of steps. Other functional languages, such as Lisp, OCaml and Erlang, support a mixture of procedural and functional programming.
In logical programming languages
Logic programming
Logic programming is, in its broadest sense, the use of mathematical logic for computer programming. In this view of logic programming, which can be traced at least as far back as John McCarthy's [1958] advice-taker proposal, logic is used as a purely declarative representation language, and a...
, programs consist of logical statements, and the program executes by searching for proofs of the statements. As in functional programming languages, some logical programming languages such as Prolog
Prolog
Prolog is a general purpose logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is declarative: the program logic is expressed in terms of...
, and database query languages such as SQL
SQL
SQL is a programming language designed for managing data in relational database management systems ....
, while declarative in principle,
also support a procedural style of programming.
Many imperative programming languages (such as Fortran
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
, BASIC
BASIC
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
and C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
) were abstraction
Abstraction
Abstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts, first principles, or other methods....
s of assembly language
Assembly language
An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...
.
Overview
The hardware implementation of almost all computers is imperative;Reconfigurable computingReconfigurable computing
Reconfigurable computing is a computer architecture combining some of the flexibility of software with the high performance of hardware by processing with very flexible high speed computing fabrics like field-programmable gate arrays...
is a notable exception nearly all computer hardware is designed to execute machine code
Machine code
Machine code or machine language is a system of impartible instructions executed directly by a computer's central processing unit. Each instruction performs a very specific task, typically either an operation on a unit of data Machine code or machine language is a system of impartible instructions...
, which is native to the computer, written in the imperative style. From this low-level perspective, the program state is defined by the contents of memory, and the statements are instructions in the native machine language of the computer. Higher-level imperative languages use variable
Variable (programming)
In computer programming, a variable is a symbolic name given to some known or unknown quantity or information, for the purpose of allowing the name to be used independently of the information it represents...
s and more complex statements, but still follow the same paradigm. Recipe
Recipe
A recipe is a set of instructions that describe how to prepare or make something, especially a culinary dish.-Components:Modern culinary recipes normally consist of several components*The name of the dish...
s and process checklist
Checklist
A checklist is a type of informational job aid used to reduce failure by compensating for potential limits of human memory and attention. It helps to ensure consistency and completeness in carrying out a task...
s, while not computer program
Computer program
A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...
s, are also familiar concepts that are similar in style to imperative programming; each step is an instruction, and the physical world holds the state. Since the basic ideas of imperative programming are both conceptually familiar and directly embodied in the hardware, most computer languages are in the imperative style.
Assignment statements, in imperative paradigm, perform an operation on information located in memory and store the results in memory for later use. High-level imperative languages, in addition, permit the evaluation
Evaluation (disambiguation)
Evaluation mainly refers to the process of characterizing and appraising something of interest or of determining the value of an expression...
of complex expressions
Expression (programming)
An expression in a programming language is a combination of explicit values, constants, variables, operators, and functions that are interpreted according to the particular rules of precedence and of association for a particular programming language, which computes and then produces another value...
, which may consist of a combination of arithmetic operations and function
Function (mathematics)
In mathematics, a function associates one quantity, the argument of the function, also known as the input, with another quantity, the value of the function, also known as the output. A function assigns exactly one output to each input. The argument and the value may be real numbers, but they can...
evaluations, and the assignment of the resulting value to memory. Looping statements (such as in while loop
While loop
In most computer programming languages, a while loop is a control flow statement that allows code to be executed repeatedly based on a given boolean condition. The while loop can be thought of as a repeating if statement....
s, do while loop
Do while loop
In most computer programming languages, a do while loop, sometimes just called a do loop, is a control flow statement that allows code to be executed repeatedly based on a given Boolean condition. Note though that unlike most languages, Fortran's do loop is actually analogous to the for loop.The...
s and for loop
For loop
In computer science a for loop is a programming language statement which allows code to be repeatedly executed. A for loop is classified as an iteration statement....
s) allow a sequence of statements to be executed multiple times. Loops can either execute the statements they contain a predefined number of times, or they can execute them repeatedly until some condition changes. Conditional branching
Branch (computer science)
A branch is sequence of code in a computer program which is conditionally executed depending on whether the flow of control is altered or not . The term can be used when referring to programs in high level languages as well as program written in machine code or assembly language...
statements allow a sequence of statements to be executed only if some condition is met. Otherwise, the statements are skipped and the execution sequence continues from the statement following them. Unconditional branching statements allow the execution sequence to be transferred to some other part of the program. These include the jump (called "goto
Goto
goto is a statement found in many computer programming languages. It is a combination of the English words go and to. It performs a one-way transfer of control to another line of code; in contrast a function call normally returns control...
" in many languages), switch
Switch statement
In computer programming, a switch, case, select or inspect statement is a type of selection control mechanism that exists in most imperative programming languages such as Pascal, Ada, C/C++, C#, Java, and so on. It is also included in several other types of languages...
and the subprogram, or procedure
Subroutine
In computer science, a subroutine is a portion of code within a larger program that performs a specific task and is relatively independent of the remaining code....
, call (which usually returns to the next statement after the call)..
Block structure
Early in the development of high level languages, the introduction of the block enabled the construction of programs in which a group of statements and declarations could be treated as if they were a single statement. This, alongside the introduction of subroutineSubroutine
In computer science, a subroutine is a portion of code within a larger program that performs a specific task and is relatively independent of the remaining code....
s, enabled complex structures to be expressed by hierarchical decomposition into simpler procedural structures.
History
The earliest imperative languages were the machine languages of the original computers. In these languages, instructions were very simple, which made hardware implementation easier, but hindered the creation of complex programs. FORTRANFortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
, developed by John Backus
John Backus
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form , the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax.He also did research in...
at IBM starting in 1954, was the first major programming language to remove the obstacles presented by machine code in the creation of complex programs. FORTRAN was a compiled language
Compiled language
A compiled language is a programming language whose implementations are typically compilers , and not interpreters ....
that allowed named variables, complex expressions, subprograms, and many other features now common in imperative languages. The next two decades saw the development of a number of other major high-level imperative programming languages. In the late 1950s and 1960s, ALGOL
ALGOL
ALGOL is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid 1950s which greatly influenced many other languages and became the de facto way algorithms were described in textbooks and academic works for almost the next 30 years...
was developed in order to allow mathematical algorithms to be more easily expressed, and even served as the operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
's target language for some computers. MUMPS
MUMPS
MUMPS , or alternatively M, is a programming language created in the late 1960s, originally for use in the healthcare industry. It was designed for the production of multi-user database-driven applications...
(1966) carried the Imperative paradigm to a logical extreme, by not having any statements at all, relying purely on commands, even to the extent of having the IF and ELSE commands be independent of each other, and only connected by a intrinsic variable named $TEST. COBOL
COBOL
COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....
(1960) and BASIC
BASIC
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
(1964) were both attempts to make programming syntax look more like English. In the 1970s, Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.-Biography:Wirth...
, and C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
was created by Dennis Ritchie
Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie , was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era." He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system...
while he was working at Bell Laboratories. Wirth went on to design Modula-2
Modula-2
Modula-2 is a computer programming language designed and developed between 1977 and 1980 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich as a revision of Pascal to serve as the sole programming language for the operating system and application software for the personal workstation Lilith...
, and Oberon. For the needs of the United States Department of Defense
United States Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense is the U.S...
, Jean Ichbiah
Jean Ichbiah
Jean David Ichbiah was a French-born computer scientist and the chief designer of Ada, a general-purpose, strongly typed programming language with certified validated compilers....
and a team at Honeywell
Honeywell
Honeywell International, Inc. is a major conglomerate company that produces a variety of consumer products, engineering services, and aerospace systems for a wide variety of customers, from private consumers to major corporations and governments....
began designing Ada in 1978, after a 4-year project to define the requirements for the language. The specification was first published in 1983, with revisions in 1995 and 2005/6.
The 1980s saw a rapid growth in interest in object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...
. These languages were imperative in style, but added features to support objects. The last two decades of the 20th century saw the development of a considerable number of such programming languages. Smalltalk-80, originally conceived by Alan Kay
Alan Kay
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."He is the president of the Viewpoints Research...
in 1969, was released in 1980 by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Drawing from concepts in another object-oriented language—Simula
Simula
Simula is a name for two programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard...
(which is considered to be the world's first object-oriented programming language
Object-oriented programming language
This is a list of object-oriented programming programming languages.-Languages with object-oriented features:*ABAP*Ada 95*AmigaE*BETA*Blue*Boo*C++*C#*COBOL*Cobra*ColdFusion*Common Lisp*COOL*CorbaScript*Clarion*CLU*Curl*D*Dylan*E*Eiffel...
, developed in the late 1960s)—Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne Stroustrup ; born December 30, 1950 in Århus, Denmark) is a Danish computer scientist, most notable for the creation and the development of the widely used C++ programming language...
designed C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
, an object-oriented language based on C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
. C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
was first implemented in 1985. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the notable imperative languages drawing on object-oriented concepts were Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
, released by Larry Wall
Larry Wall
Larry Wall is a programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987.-Education:Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976....
in 1987; Python
Python (programming language)
Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
, released by Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator For Life" , meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary...
in 1990; PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
, released by Rasmus Lerdorf
Rasmus Lerdorf
Rasmus Lerdorf is a Danish programmer with Canadian citizenship and is most notable as the creator of the PHP scripting language. He authored the first two versions...
in 1994; Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
, first released by Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
in 1994 and Ruby
Ruby (programming language)
Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...
, released in 1995 by Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto. Microsoft's .NET platform (2002) is at its core imperative as are its primary target languages, VB.NET and C#.