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Plankalkul
Made by Konrad Zuse. First high-level programming language, designed for engineering calculation usage.
Name is supposed to roughly mean “formal system” in German. -
Fortran
Made by John Backus. Built for engineering and scientific purposes, and other computationally-intensive workloads. Name is derived from “Formula Translation”. -
MATH-MATIC
Made by Charles Katz. Used on the UNIVAC 1 and 2. Mathematical calculations. -
Lisp
Made by John McCarthy. Pioneered modern computer science, including data structures and artificial intelligence. -
COBOL
Made by CODASYL, or the Committee on Data Systems Languages. Designed for business use-cases, like data processing. Stands for “common business-oriented language”. -
RPG
Made by IBM. Built for business applications as an IBM machine proprietary language. Stands for “Report Program Generator”. -
BASIC
Made by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. Stands for “Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”. Built to be general purpose and easy to learn and use. -
LOGO
Made by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Soloman. It's a dialect of Lisp, mostly used for “turtle graphics”, a method of vector graphics. -
B
Made by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Primarily used in non-numeric applications, like logical decision solving. -
Pascal
Made by Niklaus Wirth. Primarily used with complex data structures.
Named in honor of French mathematician, Blaise Pascal. -
C
Made by Dennis Ritchie.Built for portability, and for operating systems and “embedded systems”. Usually superseded by newer language for regular use. -
ML
Made by Robin Milner. Used for statistical purposes and programming research. Means “Meta-Language”. -
Ada
Made by Jean Ichbiah. Named after Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. Used in critical military and civilian applications such as aviation and banking. -
C++
Made by Bjarne Stroustrup. General purpose. Specifically made for desktop applications and other applications that require performance efficiency. Considered "C with classes". -
SQL
Made by Donald Chamberlain and Raymond Boyce. Most notably used in databases and other things dealing with structured data. Common in backend web development. Stands for “Structured Query Language”. -
Python
Made by Guido van Rossum. Built for ease of learning and readability, and can be used in many applications, including web development, scientific computing, and information security exploits. -
Visual Basic
Made by Microsoft. Built for ease of learning. Not used often today, but can be used to easily automate tasks or make small applications. -
Delphi
Made by the Borland Software Corporation. Can be used for desktop, mobile, and web applications. Supports “rapid application development”. -
Java
Made by James Gosling and Sun Microsystems, now Oracle. General purpose language, built to not have many dependencies. Important for Android development. -
JavaScript
Made by Brenden Eich. Usually used to make webpages more interactive as the 3rd major frontend web programming language, but it has some other minor uses. -
PHP
Made by PHP Development Team and Zend Technologies. Commonly utilized for backend web development.
Stands for “Personal Home Page”.