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Plankalkul
First appearing in 1948, Plankalkul is a language created by Konrad Zuse. It was designed for engineering purposes. -
MATH-MATIC
Created in 1957 by Charles Katz and his group, MATH-MATIC was an early language designed to be an improvement to FORTRAN. -
Fortran
Developed in April 1957 by John Backus, Fortran is good for numeric computations, and also for scientific computing. Fortran is derived from the phrase "Formula Translating System". -
Lisp
Invented in 1958 by John McCarthy at MIT, Lisp was created for mathematical notation in computer programs. Later, it became a language used widely for artificial intelligence. -
COBOL
Developed sometime in 1959 by Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, and Gertrude Tierney. It was designed to be easy for business use, and its name is an acronym for "COmmon Business-Oriented Language". -
RPG
Developed in 1959 by IBM, RPG was used mainly for business applications, and is still a popular language on some IBM operating systems. -
BASIC
Designed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, to be an easy-to-use language that allowed the general populace to program. BASIC stands for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". -
LOGO
Developed in 1967 by Daniel G. Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, LOGO was a language that was used to teach programming principles related to LISP, another language. The name is taken from Greek "logos", which means "word", or "thought". -
B
Developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, used mainly for language and system software. Name is taken from BCPL, because it is a version of that which is designed to fit in the memory of minicomputers. No clear release date. -
PASCAL
Designed in 1970 by Niklaus WIrth, PASCAL was created to teach programming, and later evolved to a language to ensure good programming habits. Named after Blaise Pascal. -
C
Designed sometime in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie, C is a general purpose language, supporting many operations. C is named that because it's the next step after B, another programming language. -
ML
ML was developed in 1973 by Robin Milner (and other people from the University of Edinburgh). It is a general-purpose language. ML stands for "metalanguage". -
SQL
First appearing in 1974, SQL was designed by Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce. It is a language designed for managing data and stream processing. -
C++
Developed sometime in 1983 by Bjarne Stroustrup, it's a combination of C and Simula, another language. Simula wasn't suitable for large software development, and was too slow, and C was fast but too simple, so he combined elements from both to make C++. -
ADA
Developed by Jean Ichbiah, to replace the hundreds of different languages used by the Department of Defence. It's designed for developing big software systems. Name references Ada Lovelace, the first programmer. -
Python
Developed in 1991 by Guido van Rossum, Python is a general-purpose language, emphasizing readability and allowing more concise code to be written. -
Visual Basic
First appearing in 1991, Visual Basic is derived from another language, BASIC. It is intended to be relatively easy for one to learn and use Visual Basic. -
Delphi
Developed in 1995 by software company Borland, Delphi is a language that supports rapid application development, which means that it focuses more on development, instead of planning tasks. -
Java
First released in 1995 and designed by James Gosling, who worked for Sun Microsystems at the time (now Oracle). It's a general-purpose language, and can run on all platforms that can run Java without needing to rewrite the code. -
Javascript
Developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich, under Netscape Communications Corporation. It's used mostly in web browsers, with functions that allow the user to interact with the browser. -
PHP
Created by Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP is good for general-purpose programming, but it was made for web development. PHP stands for "personal home page".