Programming Languages Timeline

By brian.beverly

  • Plankalkul

    Developed by Konrad Zuse, designed for engineering purposes. Plankalkul means "Plan Calculus".

  • Fortran

    Developed by John Backus and is specifically suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Fortran is derived from "Formula Translation".

  • Lisp

    Developed by Steve Russell, Timothy P. Hart, and Mike Levin, as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs. Lisp does not have any special meanings.

  • COBOL

    Developed by CODASYL, ANSI, and ISO for business use. COBOL stands for "common business-oriented language".

  • RPG

    Developed by IBM, "RPG is a high-level programming language (HLL) for business applications." RPG stands for Report Program Generator.

  • LOGO

    Developed by Wally Feurzeig, and Seymour Papert as a general-purpose language. Logo is derived from the Greek word "Logos", which means "word" or "thought".

  • B

    Developed by Ken Thompson for recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications, like system and language software. B came from BCPL.

  • BASIC

    Developed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz to be a simple and easy to use language. BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

  • PASCAL

    Developed by Niklaus Wirth, "intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring."

  • C

    C was developed by Dennis Ritchie and used to re-implement the Unix operating system. C has no specific meaning.

  • ML

    Developed by Robin Milner to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover. ML stands for MetaLanguage.

  • SQL

    Developed by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce, "SQL is a special-purpose domain-specific language used in programming and designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS), or for stream processing in a relational data stream management system." SQL stands for Structured Query Language.

  • C++

    Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup for general purposes. C++ does not have a special meaning or acronym.

  • ADA

    Developed by Jean Ichbiah to exceed over 450 programming languages used at that time. ADA was named after Ada Lovelace, who was the first computer programmer.

  • Visual Basic

    Developed by Microsoft, Visual Basic was intended to be relatively easy to learn and use.

  • Python

    Developed by Python Software Foundation, "Python is a widely used high-level programming language used for general-purpose programming."

  • Java

    Developed by James Gosling, Java is intended to let application developers "write once, run anywhere".

  • Javascript

    Developed by Brendan Eich, Javascript is a high-level, dynamic, untyped, and interpreted programming language. It was developed to be used on the web and for browsers.

  • PHP

    Developed by The PHP Development Team, Zend Technologies for web developement. PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

  • Delphi

    Developed by Embarcadero Technologies for desktop, mobile, web, and console applications. Delphi is short for Embarcadero Delphi.