Timeline: Programming languages history

1948

Plankalkul

Invented by Konrad Zuse. It was created for engineering purposes. The word Plankalkul comes from "Plan Calculus".

1957

Fortran

Developed by John Backus and IBM. It was created for for scientific and engineering applications. The name was derived from formula translation.

1957

MATH-MATIC

Invented by Remington Rand. It provided algebraic-style expressions and floating-point arithmetic.

1958

Lisp

John McCarthy. Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs. It was first called LISP.

1959

COBOL

Developed by CODASYL. It was created as an effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. COBOL is an acronym for common business-oriented language.

1959

RPG

Invented by IBM. Created to be a Report Program Generator.

1964

BASIC

Invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. It was created for people that didn't have much knowledge of programming. BASIC means Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

1967

LOGO

Invented by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. The language was conceived to teach concepts of programming related to Lisp. The name was derived from Greek.

1969

B

Invented by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. B was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications, such as system and language software. Named after Bon, another programming language.

1970

Pascal

Invented by Niklaus Wirth. It was made as an efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It was named after Blaise Pascal.

1972

C

Invented by Dennis Ritchie. It was created to provide low level access to memory and to not require run time support. The letter doesn't have any significance.

1973

ML

Invented by Robin Milner. It provides pattern matching for function arguments. It has roots in Lisp, and has been characterized as "Lisp with types".

1974

SQL

Invented by Donald D. Chamberlin Raymond F. Boyce. SQL was one of the first commercial languages. The acronym SEQUEL was changed into SQL.

1980

ADA

Invented by Jean Ichbiah. It was made to supersede over 450 programming languages used by the DoD. Ada was named after Ada Lovelace, the first programmer.

1983

C++

Invented by Bjarne Stroustrup. It was created as an expansion of the language C becuase Stroustrup wanted a more flexible version. C++ was first called C with classes.

1991

Python

Invented by Guido van Rossum. It allows allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code from other languages. The author chose Python as the title for his "project"

1991

Visual Basic

Invented by Microsoft. Microsoft intended Visual Basic to be relatively easy to learn and use. The name has basic in it because it is intended to be used for learning.

1995

Delphi

Developed by Embarcadero Technologies. It was created as a rapid application development tool for Windows as the successor of Turbo Pascal.Danny Thorpe suggested the name in reference to the Oracle at Delphi.