Programming History Timeline

By daltono

  • Plankalkul

    Plankalkul was designed by Konrad Zuse, and first appeared in 1948. The purpose of the language was for engineering purposes.

  • Fortran

    Fortran was developed by John Backus and IBM initially in 1957. The purpose of the programming language was to be a general-purpose language that was suited to numeric computation. The name is derived from: Formula Translating System.

  • MATH-MATIC

    MATH-MATIC was created by Charles Katz and a group in1957. The purpose of the language was to provide an improvement of Fortran.

  • Lisp

    Lisp was developed by Steve Russell, Timothy Hart, and Mike Levin, and initially appeared in 1958. The original purpose of the language was to provide practical mathematical notation for computer programs. The name Lisp derives from List Processor.

  • COBOL

    COBOL was designed in 1959 by Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean Sammet, William Selden, and Gertrude Tierney, with the intention of creating a portable programming language for data processing. COBOL is an acronym for: Common Business-Oriented Language.

  • RPG

    RPG was developed by IBM and first appeared in 1959. The purpose of the language was to replicated punched-card processing. RPG stands for: Report Program Generator.

  • BASIC

    BASIC was designed in 1964. The developers of the language are John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. The purpose of BASIC was seemingly to provide ease of use, as scene in the language's design philosophy. BASIC is an acronym for: Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

  • Logo

    Logo initially appeared in 1967 and was developed by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert, and the purpose of the language was educational.

  • B

    B was developed around 1969, by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. The purpose of the language was to be optimal for minicomputers at the time. The name may be derived from the word Bon, or it may be a contraction of BCPL, the language B was based off of.

  • C

    C was developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie and Bell Labs. The purpose of the language was to be a general-purpose language. The language is named “C” because its features were derived from B.

  • Ada

    ADA was developed in the 1970s, but made an appearance in 1980. Jean Ichbiah and a group led by Ichbiah developed the language. The purpose of Ada was seemingly to become a standardized programming language that featured object-oriented programming. Ada was named after a person who is credited as being the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace.

  • ML

    ML is a programming language developed by Robin Milner and others in the early 1970s. The purpose of the language was to provide proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover. ML stands for metalanguage.

  • Pascal

    Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth and first appeared in 1970. The purpose of the language was to encourage good programming practices.

  • SQL

    SQL was designed by Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce, and first appeared in 1974. The language was designed for managing data. SQL stands for: Structured Query Language.

  • C++

    C++ started being developed in 1979 by Bjarne Stroustrup. The purpose of the programming language was to enhance the C language with Simula features. According to the developer of the language, the name “signifies the evolutionary nature of the changes from C”.

  • Python

    Python is developed by Python Software Foundation and was designed by Guido van Rossum. The language first appeared in 1991. The purpose of the programming language was to emphasize code readability.

  • Visual Basic

    Visual Basic was developed by Microsoft and first appeared in 1991. The purpose of the language emphasizes RAD use of GUI applications.

  • Delphi

    Delphi is a language developed by Borland, a software company. Initial development of the language started in 1995. The purpose of the programming language was to provide an integrated development environment for applications. The name of the language is a reference to the Oracle at Delphi.

  • Java

    Java is a general-purpose programming language that was developed by Oracle Corporation, and first appeared in 1995. Seemingly, the purpose of Java is to provide as few implementation dependencies as possible. The name is derived from Java Coffee.

  • Javascript

    Javascript was developed by Netscape Communications Corporation, Mozilla Foundation, and Ecma International, where it first appeared in 1995. The purpose of the programming language is to be a high-level, untyped, dynamic, and interpreted programming language. The name of the language was initially Mocha, then LiveScript, then JavaScript.

  • PHP

    PHP first appeared in 1995 and was developed by Zend Technologies. The purpose of the language was to provide a general-purpose language, and a language designed for web development. PHP stands for: PHP Hypertext Preproccesor.