Programming Languages Timeline

  • Plankalkul

    Plankalkül (German pronunciation for "Plan Calculus") is a computer language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1943 and 1945. It was the first high-level non-von Neumann programming language to be designed for a computer.
  • MATH-MATIC

    MATH-MATIC is the marketing name for the AT-3 compiler. It is a early programming language for UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II. It was Intended to be an improvement over FORTRAN. It was designed and created by a group led by Charles Katz in 1957.
  • Fortran

    Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. It was originally designed by John Backus at IBM's campus in south San Jose, California in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications. The name is derived from the IBM Mathematical (For)mula (Tran)slating System.
  • Lisp

    Lisp is a family of computer programming languages that were created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. Lisp was designed by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The named is derived from the term "LISt Processing."
  • COBOL

    COBOL was primarily designed by Grace Hopper. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.
  • BASIC

    BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design emphasizes ease of use; the name is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The original Dartmouth BASIC was designed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA to provide computer access to non-science students.
  • LOGO

    Logo is a multi-paradigm computer programming language used in education. It is an adaptation and dialect of the Lisp language. Logo was created in 1967 by Daniel G. Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. It is named after the Greek word Logos, meaning "word."
  • B

    B is a programming language that was developed at Bell Labs. It is now extinct, having been superseded by the C language. It was mostly designed by Ken Thompson, with contributions from Dennis Ritchie.
  • Pascal

    Pascal is an influential and procedural programming language, designed in 1968–1969 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.
  • C

    C is a general-purpose programming language initially developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs. Its design provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and has found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language. C is one of the most widely used programming languages of all time, and there are very few computer architectures for which a C compiler does not exist.
  • ML

    ML is a general-purpose functional programming language developed by Robin Milner and others in the early 1970s at the University of Edinburgh. ML stands for metalanguage: it was conceived to develop proof tactics in the LCF (Logic for Computable Funcitons) theorem prover.
  • SQL

    SQL (Structured Query Language) is a special-purpose programming language designed for managing data in relational database management systems. SQL was initially developed at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce in the early 1970s.
  • ADA

    ADA was designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull working for the United States Department of Defense from 1977 to 1983 to supersede the hundreds of programming languages then used by the DoD. Ada was named after Ada Lovelace, who is credited as being the first computer programmer.
  • C++

    C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell Labs, it adds object oriented features, such as classes, and other enhancements to the C programming language. Originally named C with Classes, the language was renamed C++ in 1983, as a pun involving the increment operator.
  • Python

    Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Its syntax is said to be clear and expressive. Python has a large and comprehensive standard library. Python was designed by Guido van Rossum.
  • Visual Basic

    Visual Basic is a third-generation programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft for its COM programming model first released in 1991. Visual Basic is designed to be relatively easy to learn and use.
  • JavaScript

    JavaScript (JS) is an open source client-side scripting language commonly used as part of a web browser in order to create enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites. JavaScript was developed at Netscap, by Brendan Eich.
  • Java

    Java is a general-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented computer programming language that is specifically designed to let application developers "write once, run anywhere." It was designed by James Gosling and Sun Microsystems.
  • PHP

    PHP is an open source server-side scripting language designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages. It is one of the first developed server-side scripting languages to be embedded into an HTML source document rather than calling an external file to process data. PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995.
  • Delphi

    The Delphi programming language was developed by Borland and is the descendant of Turbo Pascal. Delphi was released in February 1995. Delphi is essentially object Pascal with similar programming tools found in Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0.