Timeline of Programming Languages

By Wallenc
  • Plankalkül

    Developed by Konrad Zuse
    Developed for engineering purposes.
    Translates to "Plan Calculus"
  • Math-matic

    Developed by Charles Katz
    Developed as a replacement for FORTRAN.
    It is not an acronym.
  • Fortran

    Designed by John Backus
    Designed for numeric and scientific computations
    Derived from Formula Translating System
  • Lisp

    Designed by John McCarthy
    Used as a high-level programming language
    Derived from LISt Processing
  • COBOL

    Designed by Grace Hopper, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney, etc.
    Designed for business use
    COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language
  • RPG

    Designed by IBM
    Designed for business applications
    Stands for Report Program Generator
  • BASIC

    Designed by John George Kemeny & Thomas Eugene Kurtz
    Designed to allow ease of use for people other than scientists and mathematicians.
    BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
  • Logo

    Designed by Daniel G. Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon.
    Educational programming language used to teach programming.
    Is not an acronym.
  • PASCAL

    Developed by Niklaus Wirth
    Developed to encourage good programming practices.
    Named in honor of the French Mathematician Blaise Pascal.
  • B

    Designed by Ken Thompson
    Designed for system and language software
    B isn't an acronym.
  • C

    Developed by Dennis Ritchie & Bell Labs
    Developed as a general purpose programming language
    C isn't an acronym
  • ML

    Developed by Robert Milner
    Developed to proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover.
    ML stands for MetaLanguage.
  • SQL

    Designed by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce.
    Designed for managing data held in a relational database management system.
    Stands for Structured Query Language.
  • Ada

    Initially developed by Jean Ichbiah
    Originally developed for use by the DoD to supercede all of the languages used by them at the time
    Ada isn't an acronym, but a name; Ada Lovelace, the "first" computer programmer.
  • C++

    Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup
    Designed for general purposes
    C++ isn't an acronym.
  • Python

    Designed by Guido Van Rossum
    Designed for high-level, general purpose use.
    It is not an acronym.
  • Visual Basic

    Developed by Microsoft
    Developed as a basic form coding that was easy to learn.
    It doesn't stand for anything.
  • PHP

    Developed by Rasmus Lerdorf
    Developed for web development / general purpose coding.
    PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
  • Delphi

    Developed by Borland
    Designed as an application development tool for Windows
    Delphi isn't an acronym.
  • Java

    Designed by James Gosling
    Implemented in OpenJDK
    Isn't an acronym
  • JavaScript

    Designed by Brendan Eich
    Used as a dynamic programming language in web browsers.
    Isn't an acronym