Programming Languages Timeline

  • Plankalkül

    It was designed by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945 and was the first high-level programming language to be designed for a computer. It was designed to be used for engineering purposes.
  • Fortran

    It's a general purpose programming language used mainly for numeric and scientific computing. Fortran is a abbreviation of "Formula Translation". It was designed by John Backus and developed by him and IBM.
  • COBOL

    The team behind COBOL consisted of Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney.
    It's mainly used in businesses, finance, and admin systems.
    COBOL stands for (Common Business Oriented Language).
  • MATH-MATIC

    MATH-MATIC is the marketed name for AT-3 compiler, which was an early programming language. It was written by a team led by Charles Katz and was made for doing math.
  • Lisp

    Designed by John McCarthy, developed by Steve Russell, Timothy P. Hart, and and Mike Levin. It's the second oldest high-level programming language that is still used commonly today. It was originally made as a mathematical notation for computer programs.
  • IBM RPG

    This was designed and made by IBM. It's used as a high-level programming language for business applications. It stands for "Report Program Generator"
  • BASIC

    BASIC was made as an easy to learn language for people to use. It enabled many people to learn how to use computers since they no longer had to write custom software.
    BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz.
  • LOGO

    It was designed and developed by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert. It's creation was influenced by Lisp. LOGO was made as an educational programming language and is remembered for it's use of turtle graphics.
  • B

    B was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications. These were mainly used for system and programming software.
    B comes from BCPL or Basic Combined Programming Language.
    Created by Ken Thompson with Dennis Ritchie.
  • Pascal

    It was designed by Niklaus Wirth and it was used to encourage structured programming and data structures.
  • C

    Dennis Ritchie created C as a general purpose, imperative computer programming language. It is designed to be a very straightforward compiler (Translates source code).
    It doesn't stand for anything specific, but the devs were considering rewriting B before they moved on to C.
  • ML

    General purpose functional programming language written by Robin Milner and others at the University of Edinburgh. ML stand for MetaLanguage. The language was mainly used for math equations and calculus.
  • SQL

    SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It's a special purpose programming language made for managing data. It was designed by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce, and it was developed by ISO/IEC
  • ADA

    The primary purpose of Ada is for large software systems, but it was originally made for embedded and real time systems. It is not an acronym.
    ADA was made by a team led by Jean Ichbiah
  • C++

    C++ was made to be a general purpose programming language. It was originally developed by Bjarne Stroustrup.
  • Python

    Python is widely used as a high-level, general purpose, interpreted, and dynamic programming language. It's designed for readability and uses overall less lines than C++ or Java, 2 other big programming languages. The first designs for it were from Guido van Rossum and it was made by Python Software Foundation.
  • Visual Basic

    It's a third-gen event driven programming language from Microsoft for it's component Object Model. It is designed to be easy to learn and it was influenced by the programming language BASIC.
  • Java

    General purpose computer programming language. Promotes a "Write once, run everywhere" method, which means that all systems can use Java without needing anything special.
    Designed by James Gosling, developed by Sun Microsystems, who are now owned by Oracle Corporation.
  • JavaScript

    Javascript was designed by Brendan Eich and developed by Netscape Communications Corporation, Mozilla Foundation, and Ecma International. It's a high level, interpreted programming language. It's one of the big 3 technologies of the World Wide Web as well.
  • PHP

    PHP is a server side scripting language. It's mainly used for web design, but is also used as a general purpose programming language. It was designed by Rasmus Lerdorf and developed by Zend Technologies. PHP once stood for Personal Home Page, but now it has a recursive acronym, "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor"
  • Delphi

    Delphi was created in 1995 Anders Hejlsberg and Danny Thorpe.
    It was created primarily as a software development kit.