Programming Languages Timeline

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    Plankalkül

    Plankalkül ("Plan Calculus" in English) is a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. (Citation: “Plankalkül.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/plankalk%c3%bcl.)
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    Fortran

    Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran (formerly FORTRAN, derived from "Formula Translation") has been in continuous use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry. (Citation: “Fortran.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fortran.)
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    MATH-MATIC

    MATH-MATIC was written beginning around 1955 by a team led by Charles Katz under the direction of Grace Hopper. A preliminary manual was produced in 1957 and a final manual the following year. Syntactically, MATH-MATIC was similar to Univac's contemporaneous business-oriented language, FLOW-MATIC, differing in providing algebraic-style expressions and floating-point arithmetic, and arrays. (Citation: “MATH-MATIC.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/math-matic.)
  • Lisp

    Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today. Only Fortran is older, by one year. Lisp was originally created by John McCarthy and used as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. (Citation: “Lisp (Programming Language).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lisp_(programming_language).)
  • COBOL

    COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was designed in 1959, by CODASYL and was partly based on previous programming language design work by Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as "the (grand)mother of COBOL".It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. (Citation: “COBOL.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cobol.)
  • RPG

    RPG is a high-level programming language (HLL) for business applications. It has a long history, having been developed by IBM in 1959 as the Report Program Generator - a tool to replicate punched card processing on the IBM 1401 then updated to RPG II for the IBM System/3 in the late 1960s, and since evolved into an HLL equivalent to COBOL and PL/I. (Citation: “IBM RPG.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ibm_rpg.)
  • BASIC

    BASIC (an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use. In 1964, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original BASIC language at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. (Citation: “BASIC.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/basic.)
  • LOGO

    LOGO is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Daniel G. Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. The language was originally conceived to teach concepts of programming related to Lisp. (Citation: “Logo (Programming Language).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/logo_(programming_language).)
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    PASCAL

    Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, which Niklaus Wirth designed in 1968–69 and published in 1970, as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. (Citation: “Pascal (Programming Language).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pascal_(programming_language).)
  • B

    B is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969. It is the work of Ken Thompson with Dennis Ritchie. B was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications, such as system and language software. (Citation: “B (Programming Language).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/b_(programming_language).)
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    C

    C was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs, and used to re-implement the Unix operating system. (Citation: “C (Programming Language).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/c_(programming_language).)
  • ML

    ML is a general-purpose functional programming language developed by Robin Milner and others in the early 1970s at the University of Edinburgh. Historically, ML stands for MetaLanguage. Known for its use of the Hindley–Milner type system, whose type inference algorithm can automatically assign the types of most expressions without requiring explicit type annotations. (Citation: “ML (Programming Language).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ml_(programming_language).)
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    SQL

    SQL (Structured Query Language) is a special-purpose programming language designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS). SQL was designed by Donald D. Chamberlin & Raymond F. Boyce, and was developed by ISO/IEC. (Citation: “SQL.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sql.)
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    ADA

    Ada improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favor of runtime errors. Ada was originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983. (Citation: “Ada (Programming Language).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ada_(programming_language).)
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    C++

    C++ was designed with a bias toward system programming and embedded, resource-constrained and large systems, with performance, efficiency, and flexibility of use as its design highlights. Before the initial standardization in 1998, C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs since 1979. (Citation: “C++.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/c%2b%2b.)
  • Python

    Python is a widely used high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Python was conceived in the late 1980s, and its implementation began in December 1989 by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands as a successor to the ABC language. (Citation: “Python (Programming Language).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/python_(programming_language).)
  • Visual Basic

    Visual Basic is a third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft for its Component Object Model (COM) programming model first released in 1991 and declared legacy in 2008. (Citation: “Visual Basic.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/visual_basic.)
  • PHP

    PHP (Personal Home Page) is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, the PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. (Citation: “PHP.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/php.)
  • Delphi

    Delphi was originally developed by Borland as a rapid application development tool for Windows as the successor of Turbo Pascal. Delphi (later known as Delphi 1) was released in 1995 for the 16-bit Windows 3.1, and was an early example of what became known as Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools. (Citation: “Wikipedia.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/delphi_(programming_language)#history.)
  • Java

    Java is a general-purpose computer programming language that is concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, and specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. (Citation: “Java (Programming Language).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/java_(programming_language).)
  • Javascript

    JavaScript has been traditionally implemented as an interpreted language, but more recent browsers perform just-in-time compilation. Although it was developed under the name Mocha, the language was officially called LiveScript when it first shipped in beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0 in September 1995, but it was renamed JavaScript. (Citation: “JavaScript.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/javascript.)