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Plankalkul
Meaning "plain calculus" Plankalkul was a simple engineering language developed by Konrad Zuse in germany. The first real implementation of the language wasn't until the 1990's however it is often recognized as the first true attempt at an algothmic language. -
Fortran
Formula Translating System was an early programming language developed for IBM by John Backus. It was used primarily on the IBM 704 Mainframe. -
MATH-MATIC
MATH-MATIC was inveted by a group led by Charles Katz for UNIVAC 1 and 2 in order to improve upon FORTRAN. -
Lisp
Lisp, orginally invented by John McCarthy, is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in widespread use today. It is used, in many of it's different forms, for Artificial Intelligence research. It's name is derived from the phrase "List Processing." -
COBOL
COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages, and stands for Common Business Oriented Language. It was primarily designed by Grace Hopper (more-so for her design of Flow-MATIC which it was based on) and Jean Sammel. -
IBM RPG
RPG, meaning Report Program Generator, was a business oriented language developed for the IBM 1401 by IBM. -
BASIC
BASIC, or Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, is a family of programming languages that first appeared in 1964 as an unstructured, easy to use language that was developed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz while at Dartmouth College in order to make computer programming available to students outside fo scientific and mathematic fields of study. -
Logo
Logo was a graphic oriented education based programming language developed by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert. It is most famous for the invention of "Turtle Graphics" in which line graphics are drawn either on screen, or by a "turtle", a small robot that could be programed to draw things on paper. One of it's primary influences was LISP. -
B
B is an extinct programming language developd by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs to replace the BCPL system. -
Pascal
Pascal, named in honor of the famous mathematician, was a procedural language developed by Niklaus Wirth. Pascal was the language used in early development of Apple computers such as Lisa and early Macintosh compters. A later version, often called Object-Pascal, known as Delphi was developed to add object oriented functions in 1985. -
C
C, which has become the base for many programming languages to follow, was developed at Bell Labs as an extension and improvement upon their earlier language B. Dennis Ritchie, the primary developer of the language, says that C was made primarily to cover for the faults that B had, and allow more ready access to the functions of the PDP-11 Unix operating system. Many changes have been made to the language since then. -
ML
ML, standing for Metalanguage, was developed by Robin Milner at the University of Edinburgh in order to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover. It is, how ever not perfect as certain functions could cause "Side-Effects." -
SQL
Structured Query Language, Originally based upon relational algebra and tuple relational calculus, SQL was a language developed by Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce at IBM to retrieve information from their current database management system. -
ADA
Developed by Jean Ichbiah under contract from the Department of Defense, Ada is an Object Oriented Programing language developed to cut down on the vast number of different languages required for the DoD's current embedded and real-time projects. It gets its name from oft proclaimed first programmer Ada Lovelace. -
C++
C++ was devloped by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell Labs. He wanted to work with a more robust language, one that could do almost all of the things he required when working with UNIX. He chose C as a base because of it's general purpose and wide use. The name C++ comes from the increment operator used in C, which is ++. Many features such as class, derived class, strong typing, inlining, and default argument features were added initially, with many more to come. It's still used today -
Delphi
Designed by Apple in order to give object oriented properties to Pascal. The team was lead by Terry Tesler. Many popular programs have been written in Delphi, including, but not limited to Skype and Everest. -
Visual Basic
Visual Basic, and object based and event driven language, was developed by Microsoft in 1991 as a simple to use derivative from BASIC and RUBY. Ruby gave Visual Basic it's name by employing a visual interface that was, quite obviously, combined with Embedded BASIC. -
Python
Python, a still very widely used general purpose programming languge, was developed by Guido van Rossum as an extension of the ABC languge and is still updated regularly to this day with the most recent release being Python 3.0 on December 3rd 2008. -
Java
Developed by James Golding at Sun Microsystems originally for interactive television, Java proved to be too complicated for digital television, and turned it's production to a language based on Vitual Machines with its base in C and C++. Regardless of popular belief, Java is, in fact, named after coffee. -
PHP
Developed in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf at "The PHP Group", PHP was intended to be a server-side language used in web development, but it since has been adapted into being a general use language. PHP is still used widely today and is supported on almost every modern operating system. -
JavaScript
Developed by Brendan Eich the same year as it's more complicated brother, JavaScript was a language invented to give Java a "Visual Basic"-like, easy to use counterpart. It was originally developed under the name Mocha.