Programming Languages Timeline

  • Plankalkul

    Created by Konrad Zuse. Means "Plain Calculus" in German. Used for calculus processing.
  • Fortran

    Created by John Backus while he worked at IBM. Made for numeric and scientific computing. Derived from Formula Translating System. (FORTRAN)
  • MATH-MATIC

    Created by Charles Katz. Used for the first UNIVACs and was intended as an improvement over FORTRAN. MATH-MATIC was the marketing name for AT-3 Compliler.
  • Lisp

    Designed by John McCarthy. Made to be a practical mathematical notation for computer programs and is the favored language for AI. Second oldest language still used today. Stands for LISt Processing.
  • Cobol

    Created by Grace Hopper, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney, Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, and Jean E. Sammet. Stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, and is used in business, finance, and administrative systems.
  • RPG

    Created by IBM for business applications. Stands for Report Program Generator.
  • Basic

    Created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. Stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Designed to be an easy programming tool. Now known as Microsoft Visual Basic
  • Logo

    Created by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert. Designed to be an educational programming language. NOT an acronym, but is derived from the greek word logos meaning thought.
  • B

    Developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs circa 1969. Was designed for non-numeric, machine independent applications.
  • SQL

    Created by ISO/IEC. Stands for Structured Query Language. Designed to be a special-purpose programming language designed for managing data held in a relational database management system.
  • Pascal

    Created by Niklaus Wirth. Designed to be structured programming language. Was used to make object PASCAL.
  • C

    Designed by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Labs. Many modern programming languages are based off of 'C'. Designed to prevent uninteneded operations.
  • ML

    Created by Robin Milner and others at the University of Edinburgh. Made as a genral purpose language for developing proof tactics in the LCF theorem power. Stands for Metalanguage.
  • ADA

    Named after Ada Lovelace. Developed by Jean Ichbiah for the US military. Appeared in 1980. Used to supersede the hundreds of programs used by the DoD.
  • C++

    Created by Bjarne Stroustrup. Used fpr system programming and is one of today's standard languages.
  • Python

    Created by Guido van Rossum. Used as a general-purpose, high level programming language. An easy to use language with fewer lines of code needed.
  • Visual Basic

  • Java

    Created by James Gosling at Oracle Corperation. Designed to be a language that worked on every system.
  • PHP

    Created by Rasmus Lerdorf. Designed to be a server-side scripting language for web deveopment. Originally stood for Personal Home Page, but now means Hypertext preprocessor.
  • Delphi

    Created by the company Borland in 1995. Was bought by Embarcadero in 2009. It is an integrated development environment use in consoles, desktop graphical and web/mobile applications.
  • Javascript

    Created by Brendan Eich. Designed to be a dynamic programming language for web browsers. Not related to Java.