Programming Languages Timeline

  • Plankalkul

    Developed by Konrad Zuse
    Designed for engineering purposes
    Plankalkül means "formal system for planning".
  • Fortran

    Developed by John Backus
    Developed as a general-purpose, imperative programming language suited for numeric computation and scientific computing
  • MATH-MATIC

    Developed by Charles Katz
    Intended as an improvement over FORTRAN
  • Lisp

    Developed by John McCarthy
    Originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs
    The name LISP derives from "LISt Processing"
  • COBOL

    Designed by Grace Hopper, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney, Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet
    Designed for business use
    COBOL stands for COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
  • RPG

    Developed by IBM
    Created for punched card machines that is still in common use today
    Report Program Generator
  • BASIC

    Develped by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz
    Develped around ease of use
    Acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
  • LOGO

    Developed by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert
    Originally conceived to teach concepts of programming related to LISP
    Comes from the Greek word logos
  • B

    Develped by Ken Thompson with Dennis Ritchie
    Designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications, such as system and language software.
    Its name may be a contraction of BCPL, a language it was derived from
  • PASCAL

    Developed by Niklaus Wirth
    Designed as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring
    Named in honor of the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal
  • C

    Developed by Dennis Ritchie
    Designed to encourage cross-platform programming.
  • ML

    Developed by Robin Milner
    Conceived to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover
    Stands for metalanguage
  • SQL

    Developed by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce
    Designed for managing data held in a relational database management system
    Structured Query Language
  • ADA

    Developed by Jean Ichbiah
    Develped to replace the multitude of programming languages that had been currently used by the Department of Defense
    Named after Ada Lovelace
  • C++

    Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup
    Designed for systems programming, with performance, efficiency and flexibility of use as its design requirements
    The name relates the changes from C
  • Python

    Developed by Guido van Rossum
    Design philosophy emphasizes code readability
  • Visual Basic

    Developed by Microsoft
    Enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects
  • PHP

    Developed by Rasmus Lerdorf
    Designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language
    PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
  • Delphi

    Developed by Borland
    Developed as an application development tool for Windows
    Delphi possibly in reference to the Oracle at Delphi
  • Java

    Developed by James Gosling
    Originally designed for interactive television
    Java, from Java coffee, said to be consumed in large quantities by the language's creators
  • Javascript

    Developed Brendan Eich
    Most commonly used as part of web browsers, whose implementations allow client-side scripts to interact with the user, control the browser, communicate asynchronously, and alter the document content that is displayed