History of Computer Languages Timeline

By lindsey.harg

  • Plankalkul

    Plankalkul
    This computer language was developed by Konrad Zuse in 1948. The name originates fromthe German meaning "Plan Calculus". It is know to be the first complete high-level computer language and was designed for engineering purposes.

  • Fortran

    Fortran
    This program was first developed by John Backus and his team at IBM, a computer hardware company. The name means "Formula Translating System" and is primarily used for large-scale numerical calculations.

  • MATH-MATIC

    MATH-MATIC
    This is yet another program developed and created by Grace Hopper and was adapted from A-0. This was the early form of language for the UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II computers and was considered an improvement of the Fortran. Unofrtunately, there is no hidden meaning behind the name of this program.

  • Lisp

    Lisp
    It was developed by John McCarthy and means "List Processing". It was created to make a generic function when one is not defined by the user.

  • RPG

    RPG
    This language was created by IBM, a computer hardware company, and stands for "Report Program Generator". It is a high level language and has text generation.

  • BASIC

    BASIC
    This program was for beginners in the programming world and was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. It included all-purpose symbolic instruction code, was easy to learn, and was more commonly used on personal computers.

  • LOGO

    LOGO
    LOGO was developed by Seymour Papert, along with a team of programmers. Its name originates from a past project, which included a robotic turtle. It has the primary purpose of making LISP simpler for educational purposes.

  • B

    B
    This language was developed by Dennis M. Ritchie and has no hidden meaning behind its name. It is made to be used in PCs and Windows programs, and is primarily for non-numeric programming.

  • PASCAL

    PASCAL
    This program was developed by Prof. Niklaus Wirth with the purpose of teaching structured programming. The name comes from Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician.

  • C

    C
    This program was developed by Dennis M. Ritchie with the help of Brian Kernighan and its primary purpose is to structure data in smaller units. As for the name meaning, it is simply named after B, going in alphabetical order.

  • ML

    ML
    This language is also known as SML (Standard Metalanguage), however there are other forms of this program. This was developed by Robin Milner and has the primary purpose of being a functional programming language and an automatic memory management.

  • SQL

    SQL
    This program was designed by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce and was developed by the company ISO/IEC.
    The name means "Structured Query Language" and has the purpose of managing data in a relational database system.

  • ADA

    ADA
    ADA was named after Augusta Ada King, who some would call the frist programmer.This computer language was created specifically for large-scale programming by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah.

  • C++

    C++
    This computer language was adapted from C by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup. The efficiency of the C program remains while also now being able to be both a structural and object-oriented program. This program is more for the intermediate programmers who are more familiar with the subject.

  • COBOL

    COBOL
    COBOL was first released in 1989 and was developed by Grace Murray Hopper and her team. Its name stands for “common business oriented language” and is know as the first "user-friendly" program.

  • Python

    Python
    This language was created by Guido van Rossum with the purpose of being an interactive object-oriented program. Its name comes from the fact that the program can extend easily to multiple computer systems.

  • JAVA

    JAVA
    It was developed by James Gosling and his team at Sun Microsystems. They named it Java because of how much coffee they consumed while creating the program. It has the primary purpose of controlling house appliances using programming technology.

  • Visual Basic

    Visual Basic
    Tripod and Microsoft came together to develop this program. The name comes partially from BASIC, another form of computer language, but there is no specific meaning behind "Visual". It is a third generation event-driven program and has the purpose of being able to support object-oriented applications.

  • PHP

    PHP
    This language was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf and its name is a recursive acronym, and it means "hypertext preprocessor". This language is a server-side HTML with an embedded scripting language.

  • Delphi

    Delphi
    This language was developed by a software company called Borland. At first, the name was a joke and was deprived from greek history and the phrase “If you want to talk to [the] Oracle, go to Delphi”, which everyone ended thinking was very clever, so they ended up keeping the name. It is an object- oriented and structured program, like C++, but it is at a higher level than C++ and is much momre ccomplicated.

  • Javascript

    Javascript
    This was developed by Brendan Eich and Its name was created to make what Java was doing easier for non-programmers.
    "Livescript" but was then changed after they realized it was an addition to "Java".