A Survey of Quantum Programming Languages: History, Methods, and Tools

TL;DR

This survey reviews the history, methods, and tools for quantum programming as of 2007, analyzing the field's development and predicting future directions for quantum programming languages and tools.

Contribution

It provides an extensive overview of quantum programming languages, analyzes current tools, and offers recommendations for future development in the field.

Findings

Quantum programming is multidisciplinary and evolving rapidly.

Current tools are limited and need further development.

Future directions include more expressive and user-friendly quantum programming languages.

Abstract

Quantum computer programming is emerging as a new subject domain from multidisciplinary research in quantum computing, computer science, mathematics (especially quantum logic, lambda calculi, and linear logic), and engineering attempts to build the first non-trivial quantum computer. This paper briefly surveys the history, methods, and proposed tools for programming quantum computers circa late 2007. It is intended to provide an extensive but non-exhaustive look at work leading up to the current state-of-the-art in quantum computer programming. Further, it is an attempt to analyze the needed programming tools for quantum programmers, to use this analysis to predict the direction in which the field is moving, and to make recommendations for further development of quantum programming language tools.