Programming Languages Timeline

By NStephenH

  • Fortran

    A genral-purose programming language developed by IBM in the 1950's. Fortran is short for IBM's FORmula TRANslating System.

  • MATH-MATIC

    Created in 1957 by Charles Katz as a replacement for FORTRAN on the UNIVAC I and II.
    Also worked on by Grace Hopper.

  • LISP

    LISP was created by John McCarthy in 1958 while at MIT. He created it to be used as practical mathematics notation for computer programming, but it was quickly taken up by many fields, such as artificial intelligence. Lisp stands for LISt Processing.

  • COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Lanugage)

    Created in 1959 by Grace Hopper for business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. It stands for COmmon Business-Oriented Lanugage.

  • RPG (Report Program Generator)

    RPG (Report Program Generator) was developed by IBM for buisness applications on punch cards. It os one of the few programming languages created for punch cards still in use today.

  • BASIC (Begnnner's All-puropse Symbolic Instruction Code)

    Created by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to make the computers accessible to non-science students. BASIC Stands for Begnnner's All-puropse Symbolic Instruction Code and became widespread on microcomputers in the 70's and 80's

  • LOGO

    Logo is a computer programming language based on LISP. It was originally inteneded to be a functional programming langage that controlled a turtle as its output. It was designed at Bolt, Beranek and Newman by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert.

  • B

    Created by Ken Thompson as a stripped-down version of BCPL, freeing up more memory to work on smaller mainframes. Its name is most likely a contraction of BCPL, but it could also be short for Bon, a lanugage Thompson also worked on.

  • C

    Created in 1969 by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Labs to help efficently map computer instructions. It is named C becuase its features were derived from B.

  • Pascal

    Designed by Niklaus Wirth as a small, efficent language to encourage good programming practicies.Named after French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.

  • ML

    Created by Robin Milner at the University of Edinburgh to develop proof tactics unlike most other languages at the time, which were purely functional. ML stands for MetaLanguage.

  • SQL (Structured Query Language)

    SQL (Structured Query Language) is a programming language specifically designed for managing databases. It was developed at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce.

  • C with Classes

    Bjarne Stroustrup created C with Classes in 1979 at Bell Labs, which added Object Oriented Porgramming aspects, such as Classes, to C.

  • ADA

    Designed by a team lead by Jean Ichbiah at Cll Honeywell Bull for the US Department of Defense to replace the many languagese being used at the time. Named after Ada Lovelace. Released in the early 1980's

  • C++ (see C with Classes)

    In 1983, C with Classes was renamed C++, which is a pun using the incremental operator

  • Delphi (Object Pascal)

    Extension to Pascal which ads OOP aspects created by Borland Software Corperation for Turbo pascal in 1986 for the Apple Macintosh System. Released for DOS in 1989. When released for Windows in 1994, Renamed Dephi and added more extensions.

  • Python

    Python is an open-source programming language designed to emphesis readability. It has aspects of object oriented programming, and proecedural. It was concieved and created by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands. It is named after Monty Python's Flying Circus.

  • Visual Basic

    Visual Basiyc is an event driven programming language created microsoft to be used as the primary IDE for Microsoft Windows. It is designed to be fairly simple to learn, being similar to BASIC

  • JavaScript

    Creaded as a Lightweight interpreted lanugage developed by Sun Microsystems. Currently used to create user interfaces on websites.

  • Java

    Started in 1991 by the "Green team" at Sun Microsystems, lead by James Gosling. Named after the type of coffe consumed the most by the enigneers, Java was orinally created for interactive Televison, but was too advanced for the cable companies at the time. Java is now used for creating cross-platform programs, because of the JVM.

  • PHP (Personal Home Page)

    PHP (Personal Home Page) is an open-source server-side scripting language used to created dynamic web pages. Created by Rasmus Lerdorf. It was originally a set of pearl scripts.