IBM played a crucial role in the development of business-oriented programming languages like COBOL and PL/I.Xerox PARC introduced Smalltalk in the 1970s, which influenced modern languages such as Java and Python with its object-oriented principles.Bell Labs created C and C++, which became industry standards in systems programming and embedded systems.Market share and usage trends of programming languages are analyzed through metrics like Stack Overflow Developer Surveys and GitHub repositories.Early languages like ALGOL had minimal presence in the commercial computing market in the 1960s.From the 1970s to 1980s, system software development involved using assemblers to translate instructions into machine code.Variables in programming act as containers that hold values, similar to boxes holding items.Pointers in programming indicate the location of data rather than holding the actual data.Conditional statements in programming allow for decision-making based on specific conditions.Functions in programming serve as commands that execute a series of defined tasks.