1. When and why was Cling developed?

Cling is a core component of ROOT providing essential functionality for the analysis of the vast amounts of very complex data produced by the experimental high-energy physics community, enabling interactive exploration, dynamic interoperability and rapid prototyping capabilities to C++ developers. It was first released in 2014 with the aim to facilitate the processing of scientific data in the field of high-energy physics as the interactive, C++ interpreter in ROOT. ROOT is an open-source program written primarily in C++, developed by research groups in high-energy physics including CERN, FERMILAB and Princeton , and now used by most high-energy physics experiments. CERN is an European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Its experiments collect petabytes of data per year to be serialized, analyzed, and visualized as C++ objects.