Programming languages timeline

  • Plankalkul

    Plankalkul was created by Konrad Zuse, designed for engineering purposes. Plankalkul is German for "formal system for planning."
  • Fortran

    Developed by a team of programmers at IBM led by John Backus. FORTRAN is an acronym for FORmula TRANslation. It was designed to allow easy translation of math formulas into code
  • MATH-MATIC

    MATH-MATIC was developed by Charles Katz.
    Early programming language for UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II. Intended as an improvement over FORTRAN. However there is no acronym for MATH-MATIC.
  • RPG

    RPG was developed by many people at IBM, and was developed to replicate punch card processing on the IBM 1401, which was intended to help tab technicians to transition to newer computers. RPG stands for Report Program Generator.
  • COBOL

    Developed by Grace Hopper
    The primary purpose of COBOL is business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and government.
    The acronym for COBOL stands for COmmon Buisness Oriented Language.
  • Lisp

    The acronym Lisp stands for LISt Processing. It was developed for practical mathematical notation for computer programs. Developed by John McCarthy.
  • BASIC

    Basic is part of the Education-oriented languages. It was developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. It was primarily developed to be easy to learn by novices, especially non computer science majors, and run well on a time sharing with many users. BASIC stands for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
  • LOGO

    LOGO was developed for education use but more for constructivist teaching. LOGO was developed by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert. LOGO derived from a greek word logo meaning word.
  • B

    Ken Thompson was the main developer and Dennis Ritchie contributed to the development. The purpose of this language is for primarily non-numeric applications such as system programming. B was influenced by BCPL language.
  • PASCAL

    PASCAL was developed by Niklaus Wirth and was designed to be small and efficient which encouraged good programming practices. PASCAL is not an acronym, but instead a reference to the French mathematician Blaise Pascal.
  • C

    Developed by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan. The language was developed to desing the UNIX operating system which was used on many computers. Before C became C it was apart of the acronym BCPL Which stood for Basic Combined Programming Language, which later influenced the language B and C became an enhanced version of B.
  • ML

    ML was developed by Robert Milner and pthers, and was intended to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover. ML stands for MetaLanguage, because it was the metalanguage to pplambda, the primary language of the LCF theorem prover.
  • SQL

    SQL was developed at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlain and Raymond F. Boyce designed to manage data in relational database management systems. SQL stands for Structured Query Language
  • C++

    C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup with the purpose of improving upon the C language, particularly by making it Object-Oriented. The ++ in C++ is just an addition to C, and is not an acronym.
  • ADA

    ADA was was developed by led by Dr. Jean Ichbiah. The purpose of this language was for the U.S Department of Defense to replace the hundreds of programming languages. Although it is not an acronym for something it does stand for something different it was named after countess Ada Lovelace Who is credited as being the first computer programmer.
  • Python

    Python was developed by Guido van Rossum and was intended to succeed the ABC language by emphasizing code readability. Python is not an acronym, but rather, a reference to Monty Python.
  • Visual Basic

    The visual part of Visual basic was designed by Microsoft.Visual Basic was derived from BASIC and enables the rapid application development of graphical user interface applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects. Visual Basic has no acronym.
  • Java

    Developed by James Gosling and colleagues. Java was developed to compile a bytecode.
  • Delphi

    Delphi was developed by the software company Borland, with the project being headed by Anders Hejlsberg, and was intended to succeed Turbo Pascal with a new set of extensions. The name is not an acronym, but instead is a reference to the Oracle at Delphi.
  • Javascript

    JavaScript was developed by Brandan Eich and was developed to appeal to nonprofessional programmers rather than Java, which was aimed at professional programmers. JavaScript is not an acronym
  • PHP

    PHP was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf originally developed to maintain his own personal home page. The name PHP was originally an acronym for Personal Home Page, but now stands for Php: Hypertext Processor.