Programming Languages Timeline

  • Plankalkul

    "Plan Calculus" is a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. It was the first high-level (non-von Neumann) programming language to be designed for a computer. However, it was not implemented until 1998 and 2000.
  • MATH-MATIC

    MATH-MATIC is the marketing name for the AT-3 (Algebraic Translator 3) compiler, an early programming language for the UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II. MATH-MATIC was written beginning around 1955 by a team led by Charles Katz under the direction of Grace Hopper.
  • FORTRAN

    Originally developed by John W. Backus for IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, FORTRAN came to dominate this area of programming early on. It is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Fortran stands for FORmula TRANslation.
  • LISP

    LISP, an acronym for list processing, is a programming language that was designed for easy manipulation of data strings. LISP was invented by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at MIT. A LISP program is a function applied to data, rather than being a sequence of procedural steps as in FORTRAN and ALGOL. LISP uses a very simple notation in which operations and their operands are given in a parenthesized list.
  • COBOL

    COBOL (an acronym for common business-oriented language) is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on previous programming language design work by Grace Hopper.
  • RPG

    RPG II is a very early and popular version of the IBM RPG programming language. It was developed in the late 1960s and designed to work on the smallest IBM systems of the time such as the IBM 1130, IBM System/3, System/32, System/34, System/36. RPG stands for Report Program Generator
  • BASIC

    BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to be a good tool for beginners.
  • LOGO

    Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. "Logo" is not an acronym. It was derived from the Greek logos meaning word or "thought" by Feurzeig, to distinguish itself from other programming languages that were primarily numbers, not graphics or logic, oriented.
  • B

    B is a computer language designed by D. M. Ritchie and K. L. Thompson, for primarily non-numeric applications such as system programming. These typically involve complex logical decision-making, and processing of integers, characters, and bit strings. It simply stands for B Computer Language.
  • PASCAL

    Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, which Niklaus Wirth designed in 1968–69 and published in 1970, as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named in honor of the French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal.
  • Delphi

    Delphi was created by Prof. Niklaus Wirth. Wirth published the original definition of Pascal in 1971, and implemented it in 1973. Delphi is both an object oriented programming language (OOP) and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
  • C

    C Computer Language was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs, and used to re-implement the Unix operating system. C is a powerful general-purpose programming language, great for beginners. It is fast, portable and available in all platforms.
  • ML

    Metal language is a general-purpose functional programming language. It has roots in Lisp, and has been characterized as "Lisp with types". It was designed Robin Milner & others at the University of Edinburgh.
  • SQL

    Structured Query Language) is a domain-specific language used in programming and designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS). SQL was designed by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce in 1974.
  • ADA

    Named for Ada Lovelace, this computer language was originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense from 1977 to 1983. Ada is designed for development of very large software systems.
  • PYTHON

    Python is an interpreted high-level programming language for general-purpose programming. Created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991, Python has a design philosophy that emphasizes code readability, and a syntax that allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code, notably using significant whitespace.
  • Visual Basic

    Visual Basic (or VB) is a programming language developed by Microsoft that runs on the Net Framework. With Visual Basic you can build Windows applications, web applications and Windows phone applications. Programs developed in Visual Basic will only run on a Windows Operating System. VB was developed in 1991 by Alan Cooper.
  • PHP

    Originally designed by Rasmsu Lerdorf in 1994, PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
  • JAVA

    Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++, but it has fewer low-level facilities than either of them.
  • JAVASCRIPT

    JavaScript was the first multi-paradigm language. It was designed by Brendan Eich at Netscape, for the Netscape Navigator Web browser. JavaScript is a "client-side" programming language, which means JavaScript scripts are read, interpreted and executed in the client, which is your Web browser.
  • C++

    In 1998, C++, or C with Classes, was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs. C++ was designed to provide Simula’s facilities for program organization together with C’s efficiency and flexibility for systems programming. C++ allows you to have a lot of control as to how you use computer resources.