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Plankalkül
Designed by Konrad Zuse for engineering purposes. Plankalkül was the first high-level (non-von Neumann) programming language to be designed for a computer. Its name is a combination of the words "Plan" and "Kalkül", a word meaning 'formal system' - the name translates "a form system for planning". -
MATH-MATIC
Designed by Charles Katz, under a team of Grace Hopper (the grandmother of COBOL) for Remington Rand. MATH-MATIC is a predecessor to UNIVAC I & II. Its name is influenced by a similar program, FLOW-MATIC, that is business-oriented rather than math. -
Fortran
Designed by John Backus and IBM for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran is still used today for computing numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, crystallography, and computational chemistry. The name is a derived form of the phrase "Formula Translation". -
LISP
Designed and developed by John McCarthy, Steve Russell, Timothy P. Hart, and Mike Levin, originally created by McCarthy at MIT. The name is an abbreviation of the phrase LISt Processor. Originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs. -
RPG
Developed by IBM as a tool to replicate the punched card processing system IBM 1401. Its name is an acronym for Report Program Generator. -
COBOL
Designed by CODASYL as a part of the U.S. Department of Defense's effort to create a portable program for data processing. Grace Hopper is named the "grandmother" of COBOL because she designed the previous language to COBOL. COBOL is an acronym, representing COmmon Business Oriented Language. -
BASIC
Designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. The purpose was to allow students access to computers who were not in science or math fields. Its name is an acronym which stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. -
Logo
Designed by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon and is widely known for its turtle graphics. Logo was created for educational purposes, and its name derives from the Greek word 'logos' meaning word or thought. -
B
Developed at Bell Labs in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Designed for system languages and software. It's name is a contraction derived from BCPL. -
Pascal
Designed by Niklaus Wirth as an efficient language to encourage good programming practices. Its name originates from the French mathematician Blaise Pascal. -
C
Designed at Bell Labs by Dennis Ritchie and was made to re-implement the Unix operating system. -
ML
Designed by Robin Milner and his colleagues at the University of Edinburgh. It is mainly used for research because of it's ability to specify and verify formal semantics. Its name is an abbreviation of the phrase 'Meta Language'. -
SQL
Designed by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce under ISO/IEC. Designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS) or for stream processing of relational data stream management systems (RDSMS). Its name is an acronym for Structured Query Language. -
ADA
ADA was created by a team lead under Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull to overtake over 450 current programming languages already used by the Department of Defense between the years of 1977-1983. Named after Ada Byron, the first computer programmer. -
C++
Created by Bjarne Stroustrup to increase the speed that other programming languages at the time, such as BCPL, did not have. C++ was a part of Stroustrup's P.h.D. thesis. The name was created by Rick Mascitti and represents the evolution of the original C program. -
Visual-BASIC
Developed by Microsoft to accommodate a steep learning curve. Its name is derived from BASIC, its predecessor. -
Python
Designed by Guido van Rossum under Python Software Foundation. Emphasizes code readability and syntax that allow coders to express code in fewer lines. Its name is a reference to "Monty Python's Flying Circus". -
Delphi
Developed by Borland as a rapid application development tool Windows as the successor for the Turbo Pascal. The name originated from the Greek myth of the Oracle of Delphi. -
Java
Designed by James Gosling and developed under Sun Microsystems. Originally designed for interactive television, however the program was too advanced for the digital cable during the time. The name was originally oak, however it was eventually changed to green, and then to Java, after Java coffee. -
PHP
Designed by Rasmus Lerdorf and developed by the PHP team at Zend Technologies. Originally created to accelerate bug reports by releasing the Personal Home Page (PHP) Tools. The name is an acronym standing for Personal Home Page. -
JavaScript
Designed by Brendan Eich under the developer Netscape Communications. Originally named Mocha, the name was then changed to LiveWire, before finalizing as JavaScript. JavaScript was created to add dynamic to the World Wide Web, and act as a "glue language".
