1990: Programming languages

In 1990, I drew thirteen cartoons for the computing industry press. They were never published, so here they are from the Beholder archive. They have no particular artistic merit, but they’re mildly interesting from a nostalgically geeky point of view.

12. Fourth generation languages

Notes:
The fourth generation languages: whatever happened to those? Of course, they are still with us, but I don’t think anyone credible uses the term any more. We think in terms of libraries, frameworks, and plugins now, I suppose. It’s clear I had a pretty low opinon of them in 1990 though. Also, 20 grand presumably sounded like a ludicrous amount of money for a programmer in those days otherwise I wouldn’t have used it.

1. BASIC
2. Pascal
3. FORTRAN
4. COBOL
5. C
6. ADA
7. prolog
8. Algol
9. Object Oriented
10. Assembly code
11. Forth, Lisp & Snobol
12. 4th generation
13. Machine code

I named these verbose cartoons “the Need To Know Guide to Programming Languages”. Note that this was nothing to do with Danny O’Brien & Dave Green’s Need to Know (NTK) newsletter, which did not come along for another seven years (and to which I enthusiastically subscribed).

You’re free to use the illustration for anything provided you attribute Beholder as the source (a CC BY 4.0 license).

See more vintage Beholder nostalgia.