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Plankalkül
Plankalkül was designed in 1948 by German engineer Konrad Zuse. The name means "Plan Calculus" in English, and Zuse used it for what was described as "engineering purposes." Although the language was not truly published until 1972, it is still considered to be the first high-level non-von Neumann programming language. -
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Fortran
The Fortran language, or Formula Translating System, was designed by John Backus in 1957. Backus, along with IBM, designed the language mainly for numeric computation and scientific computing. Along with that purpose, it is also the language of choice for so called "supercomputers," especially for those benchmarked to be among the fastest in the world. -
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MATH-MATIC
MATH-MATIC was the marketing name for the AT-3 compiler, the language used on the early UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II. It was created by a group led by Charles Katz in 1957, with the hope that it would be an improvement over Fortran. -
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Lisp
Lisp was designed by John McCarthy in 1958, making it the second oldest high-level programming language still in widespread use today, only one year newer than Fortran. Lisp's original design was for the language to serve as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs. The name "Lisp" comes from LISt processing. -
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COBOL
COBOL, an acronym for "Common Business-Oriented Language," was designed by CODASYL in 1959. It was created mainly for the U.S. Department of Defense, as they wanted to make a portable programming language for data processing. In 1997, it was estimated that 80% of all business programs were using COBOL. -
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RPG or IBM RPG
RPG is a high level programming language designed by IBM in 1959, with its main intended use being for business applications. The RPG name stands for Report Program Generator, a name derived from its previous use of replicating punched cards. The language would later evolve into an HLL equivalent of COBOL and PL/I. Today it is now a popular programming language for all IBM i machines. -
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BASIC
BASIC, or Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, was created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz in 1964. They made the language in hopes to make computers usable by more people than just mathematicians and scientists. -
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Logo
Logo, designed by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert, was an educational programming language. The language made use of a "turtle," a small robot in which children could move around and predict what they would do if they were in its spot. Through this, body-syntonic reasoning was taught. The name comes from the Greek word "logos," which means "thought." -
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B
The B language's name is generally believed to be a contraction of its creator's company's name, BCPL. Ken Thompson and Kenny Ritchie developed it in the year 1969, primarily making it for recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications. -
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PASCAL
PASCAL was developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth, and it served to be very influential on programming languages of the future. The language is actually named after the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. Its use of structured programming and data structuring led to many good practices of other languages in the future, such as the language Object Pascal, designed in 1985. -
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C
The C Language (no meaning for C), designed by Dennis Ritchie, first appeared in 1972. It was designed to map to machine instructions, and found a permanent use in assembly language, such as operating systems and application software. -
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ML
ML was created by Robin Milner and the University of Edinburgh in 1973. ML actually stands for metalanguage, and the language itself was designed to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover. -
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SQL
SQL, or Structured Query Language, was designed by Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce in 1974. It is a special purpose programming language designed to manage data in an RDBMS, and also to stream process in an RDSMS. Today it is developed by the IEC and ISO. -
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Ada
The Ada language is named after Ada Lovelace, generally credited to be the first computer programmer, living from 1815 to 1852. The language first appeared in 1980, originally being designed by a team consisting of Jean Ichbiah and the Groupe Bull Company. They were designing the language for the U.S. Department of Defense, who wanted to make the language to decrease the number of languages being used in their embedded computer system projects. -
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C++
The C++ language was designed by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1983, and has since become one of the most important programming languages to date. The name of the language actually comes from one of the operators in the language, "++." Designed specifically for system programming, it has found long lasting uses in operating system kernels and in embedded systems. -
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Python
Python was developed by Guido van Rossum in 1991, and the language now is developed by the Python Software Foundation. The name is actually derived from Monty Python's Flying Circus, and references of the show are commonly made in Python code. The language is known for its readability. -
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Visual Basic
Visual Basic was developed by Microsoft in 1991, and is a third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment. The language was intended to be easy to use and serve as a beginner’s language. The name was derived from the Basic language, and the new "visual" part references the ability to use the rapid application development tools to make GUI applications. -
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Delphi
The Delphi language is an integrated development environment, or an IDE. Its creator Borland, first started the language in 1995 on Microsoft Windows systems. The name is a reference to the Oracle at Delphi located on Mount Parnassus. It was created to be a rapid application development tool for Windows. -
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Java
The Java language first appeared in 1995, designed to be a 'WORA" language, or "Write Once, Run Anywhere." This essentially means a developer only has to write code once, as it does not have to be recompiled to run on a different platform. The language was originally designed by James Gosling of Sun Microsystems, which has since merged into Oracle Corporation. It is really popularly used for its object-oriented class-based design. -
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Javascript
Javascript was designed by Brendan Eich in 1995, around the same time Java was introduced, as Java had a reasonable influence on JS. It is mainly used by developers to interact with users, and alter document content currently displayed to the user. At its beginning, it was also used by Netscape to compete with Microsoft's Visual Basic, and to serve as Netscape's "beginner" language. -
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PHP
PHP, was developed in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf, and has since served as an essential language in regards to server-side scripting and web development. PHP first stood for Personal Home Page, but now it stands for Hypertext Preprocessor.