Programming Languages Timeline

  • Plankalkul

    Creator: Konrad Zuse
    Purpose: engineering
    Acronym: Means Plan Calculus
  • FORTRAN

    Creator: John Backus
    Purpose: General purpose program suited for numeric computation and scientific computing.
    Acronym: Formula Translating System
  • MATH-MATIC

    Creator: Charles Katz
    Purpose: created as a compiler for UNIVAC I AND UNIVAC II.
    Acronym: N/A
  • Lisp

    Creator: John McCarthy
    Purpose: Practical mathematical notation for computer programs
    Acronym: LISt Processing
  • RPG

    Creator: IBM
    Purpose: business applications (punching cards)
    Acronym: Report Program Generator
  • COBOL

    Creators:Grace Hopper, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney, Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet
    Purpose: Business use
    Acronym: COmmon Business-Oriented Language
  • BASIC

    Creators: John Kemeny & Thomas Kurtz
    Purpose: Allow those unskilled at coding to be able to create custom software.
    Acroynm: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
  • Logo

    Creator: Wally Feurzing & Seymour Papert
    Purpose: Teach concepts of programming related to LISP
    Acronym: N/A
  • B

    Creators: Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie
    Purpose: recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications, such as system and language software
    Acronym: N/A
  • PASCAL

    Creator: Niklaus Wirth
    Purpose: to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.
    Acronym: Reference to Blaise Pascal
  • C

    Creators: Dennis Ritchie & Ken Thompson.
    Purpose: General purpose
    Acronym: N/A
  • ML

    Creator: Robin Milner
    Purpose: General purpose
    Acronym: metalanguage
  • SQL

    Creators: Donald Chamberlin & Raymond Boyce
    Purpose: managing data held in a database
    Acronym: Structured Query Language
  • ADA

    Creator: Jean Ichbiah
    Purpose: Replace obsolete programs the the DoD utilized.
    Acronym: Not quite an acronym but the name is a tribute to Ada Lovelace
  • C++

    Creator: Bjarne Stroustrup
    Purpose: General Purpose, but allowed for higher level features over C
    Acronym: C (heavily influenced by C)++ (++ was the increment operator in C).
  • Python

    Creator: Guido van Rossum
    Purpose: general purpose (high level however)
    Acronym: N/A
  • Visual Basic

    Creator: Alan Cooper
    Purpose: easy to learn how to program
    Acronym: N/A
  • Delphi

    Creator: Borland
    Purpose: Provide database connectivity
    Acronym: Delphi is a reference to the Oracle
  • Java

    Creator; James Gosling
    Purpose: designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible
    Acronym: Could be refering to coffee
  • PHP

    Creator: Rasmus Lerdorf
    Purpose: Web Development/General Purpose
    Acronym: Originally Personal Home Page, Now its PHP: Hypertext Perprocessor
  • Javascript

    Creator: Brendan Eich
    Purpose: Used as part of web browsers
    Acronym: N/A