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Plankalkul
Designed by Knorad Zuse for engineering purposes. It was the first high-level language made for a computer. Zuse published a paper on it in 1948. It could perform addition and multiplication. Plankalkul means "formal system for planning". -
Fortran
Fortran was designed by John Backus and first appeared in 1957. The name was derived from Formula Translation and was used for scientific and engineering applications. -
MATH-MATIC
An early programming language for the UNIVAC I and II. It first appear in 1957 and was written by a team led by Charles Katz under the direction of Grace Hopper. MATH-MATIC was the marketing name for the AT-3(Algebraic Translator) compiler. -
COBOL
COBOL stands for common business-oriented language. It was released in 1959 and is mostly used for business, finance, and administrative systems. It was based on programming language design work by Grace Hopper. It was developed by CODASYL(Conference/Committee on Data Systems Languages). -
lisp
Stands for list processing. It was developed in 1959 by John McCarthy, Steve Russell, Timothy P. Hart, and Mike Levin for the easy manipulation of data strings. It is commonly used for artificial intelligence programming and is still in relatively wide use today. -
RPG
IBM developed RPG for business applications. The name stands for Report Program Generator and it first appeared in 1959. It runs on IBM operating systems and was created for punch card machines originally. It has been updated and versions of it are still in use today. -
BASIC
Created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz in 1964. The name stands for Beginner's All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was designed for ease of use and influenced many later languages. It was a high-level general purpose language. -
LOGO
Designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon. The name was derived from the Greek word logos meaning word or thought. It is an educational programming language and was originally made to teach concepts of programming related to Lisp. -
B
B was designed by Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken L. Thompson for system programming and other non-numeric applications. It was derived from the language BCPL. That may be where the name "B" came from. -
PASCAL
Designed by Niklaus Wirth and pulished in 1970. It was named in the honor of the French mathematician, philosopher, and physicist Blaise Pascal. Wirth wanted to create an efficient language based on structured programming. It was used largely to teach students structured programming. -
C
Developed at Bell Laboratories in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie. It is used for developing system applications that form major portions of operating systems. -
ML
Developed by Robin Milner and others at the University of Edinburgh. Released in 1973. It is a general-purpose programming language and is popular with compiler writers. -
SQL
SQL stands for structured query language and first appeared in 1974. It was designed by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce. It is used in managing data held in relational database management systems. It was initially released in 1986 and is a domain-specific language. -
Ada
Designed for large applications where reliability is important. Developed in the early 80s by a team led by Dr. Jean Ichbiah at CII-Honeywell-Bull in France. Ada is not an acronym but was chosen to honor Augusta Ada Lovelace. She is sometimes regarded as the first programmer due to her work with Charles Babbage. -
C++
C++ was designed by Bjarne Stroustrup as a general purpose language with object oriented features. He began working on "C with Classes" in 1979. He renamed it to C++ in 1983. The name originates from the ++ operator in C. That operator increments the value of a variable. It is also common to use + to show that a computer program is enhanced. -
Python
Python first appeared in 1991 and was designed by Guido van Rossum. It is widely used high level language for general purpose programming. Object-oriented programming and structured programming are supported. It has a very large amount of uses including software development, web development, scientific computing, and much more. Guido got the name from the BBC comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus. -
Visual Basic
First released in 1991, Visual Basic was derived from BASIC and was meant to be relatively easy to learn and operate. It was developed by Microsoft and is still compatible on many versions of the Windows operating system. Complex GUIs can be created in Visual Basic. It is object based and event driven. Alan Cooper is widely recognized as the father of Visual Basic. -
Delphi
Delphi is a software development kit for desktop, mobile, console, and web applications. It's first version was released in 1995 for Windows 3.1 by Borland Software Corporation. The chief architect of Delphi was Anders Hejlsberg. -
Java
Java is a general-purpose language that has object-oriented functionality. It was designed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and first appeared in 1995. It became very popular within web pages. It was influenced by C++. It was originally named Oak after an oak tree outside of Gosling's office. It was renamed Java from Java coffee. -
PHP
PHP was designed by Rasmus Lerdorf and was released in 1995. It is a sever-side scripting language created mostly with web development in mind. It originally stood for personal home page but now stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. -
JavaScript
Designed by Brendan Eich and was released in 1995. It is supported by all modern web browsers and is used for content production. It is a high level language. It was named JavaScript by Netscape to associate it with the programming language Java.