Computer Programming Timeline

By zbrothers100

  • Plankalkul

    Plankalkül is a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1943 and 1945. It stands for the german pronunciation of Plan Calculus.

  • Fortran

    Fortran was designed by John Backus of IBM for the purpose of scientific and engineering applications. It stands for Formula Translating System.

  • MATH-MATIC

    MATH-MATIC is the marketing name for the AT-3 compiler, an early programming language for the UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II. Intended as an improvement over FORTRAN. Created by a group led by Charles Katz in 1957.

  • LISP

    Lisp was invented by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for the purpose of showing people that with a few simple operators and a notation for functions, one can build a Turing-complete language for algorithms. It stands for LISt Processing language.

  • COBOL

    COBOL was designed in 1959, by CODASYL and was partly based on previous programming language design work by Grace Hopper. It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. It stands for Common Business-Oriented Language.

  • RPG

    It has a long history, having been developed by IBM in 1959 as the Report Program Generator (name) - a tool to replicate punched card processing on the IBM 1401.

  • LOGO

    Logo was created in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), at Cambridge, Massachusetts research firm, by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert for the purpose of creating a math land where kids could play with words and sentences. LOGO has no significant meaning.

  • B

    This language was created by Ken Thompson with Dennis Ritchie and was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications, such as system and language software. B was derived from BCPL, and its name may be a contraction of BCPL.

  • BASIC

    Basic stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College for the purpose of ease of use.

  • PASCAL

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

  • C

    C was designed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs for the purpose of to be compiled using a relatively straightforward compiler, to provide low-level access to memory, to provide language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions, and to require minimal run-time support. C is named because it came after the language B.

  • ML

    ML is a general-purpose functional programming language developed by Robin Milner and others in the early 1970s at the University of Edinburgh for the purpose of the Hindley–Milner type inference algorithm. Historically, ML stands for metalanguage.

  • SQL

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

  • ADA

    First developed in 1980 by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull. ADA was created to supersede the hundreds of programming languages then used by the Department of Defense and was named after Ada Lovelace.

  • C++

    C++ was designed by Bjarne Stroustrup for the purpose of being an extension of the language C (hence the ++).

  • Python

    Python was conceived in the late 1980s, and its implementation was started in December 1989 by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands as a successor to the ABC language for the purpose of handling and interfacing with the Amoeba operating system. The origin of the name comes from Monty Python.

  • Visual Basic

    Visual Basic was developed by Microsoft for the intended use of being easy to learn and use and to accomidate a steep learning curve. It is derived Basic. The name comes the earlier language of Basic.

  • Delphi

    Delphi was originally developed by Borland as a rapid application development tool for Windows, and as the successor of Borland Pascal. The letters do not stand for anything more meaningful.

  • Java

    Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. It was originally designed for originally designed for interactive television. JAVA had no other significant meaning.

  • Javascript

    Javascript was developed by Brendan Eich for the purpose of competing with Microsoft. There is no significant meaning of the name is seperate of the other language Java.

  • PHP

    PHP development began in 1994 when Rasmus Lerdorf wrote several Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs in C. It was originally intended to build simple, dynamic web applications and not turn into a language for programming. It stands for Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter.