Programming Languages

Plankalkul

1948

Developed by Konrad Zuse, Plankalkul's main use is for engineering purposes. The name derives from the German term "kalkul" which stands for a formal system; the name altogether refers to a formal system for planning.

Fortran

1957

Fortran was developed by John Backus from IBM for scientific and engineering applications. Fortran is the basis for many other popular languages, such as BASIC. Fortran stands for Formula Translator.

MATH-MATIC

1957

MATH-MATIC was developed for use in the early computer UNIVAC by a team of people from Remington Rand, including Charles Katz and Grace Hopper. The name derives from the similar early programming language FLOW-MATIC, but MATH-MATIC allows for numeric exponents.

Lisp

1958

Lisp is one of the oldest high-level programming languages, and it was developed as a mathematical notation for computer programs. The name derives from "List Processor" and it was designed by John McCarthy.

COBOL

1959

COBOL, standing for "common business-oriented language," was developed by a group of programmers from COBASYL. It was made under contract of the Department of Defense to create a portable programming language for data processing.

RPG

1959

Developed by IBM, RPG is an acronym for Report Program Generator. RPG was created for the main purpose of creating reports from transactional data.

BASIC

1964

BASIC stands for Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and was developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. It was created to allow students outside of STEM majors to use computers.

LOGO

1967

The name "Logo" derives from the Greek word logos, meaning thought. Logo was developed by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon as an educational programming language. Logo is an adaptation of Lisp.

B

1969

Created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. Designed for system and language software. Possibly named after the language it's derived from, BCPL.

PASCAL

1970

PASCAL was created by Niklaus Wirth to be a programming language that encourages good programming practices. It was named after French mathematician Blaise Pascal.

C

1972

C was designed by Dennis Ritchie to construct utilities running on Unix. C is one of the most popular languages and its name derives from the precursor language B.

ML

1973

An acronym for "Meta Language," ML was developed by Robin Milner from University of Edinburgh. ML was created to be a general-purpose functional programming language.

SQL

1974

Designed by Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce, the main purpose of SQL is to manage structured data. SQL stands for "Structured Query Language."

ADA

1980

Created by Jean Ichbiah under contract of the Department of Defense. DoD wanted a language to take the place of the 450 languages previously used. Named after Ava Byron, the "Mother of the Computer."

Delphi

1983

Delphi was produced as a rapid application development tool for Windows and is a compiler of the Object Pascal programming language. It was developed by the companies Borland, CodeGear, and Embarcadero.

C++

1985

Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup as a extension of C, C++ allows for increased performed, efficiency, and flexibility. C++ is also known as "C with Classes."

Python

1991

Python was developed by Guido van Rossum as a successor to the ABC programming language. Python is currently one of the most popular programming languages due to its general-purpose use. The name comes from the British comedy group Monty Python.

Visual Basic

1991

Developed by Microsoft, Visual Basic was made to be easy to learn and use. The name comes from the language it was derived from, BASIC.

Java

1995

Java was created by James Gosling as a main component of the company Sun Microsystem's Java platform, which is where the name is derived from. Java is one of the most popular programming languages.

JavaScript

1995

A high-level programming language developed by Brendan Eich for enabling interactive web pages. Despite being fundamentally different than Java, both languages were produced by the same company, Sun Microsystems, and JavaScript used the already popular language as a marketing ploy.

PHP

1995

PHP was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf for the main purpose of web development. Originally, the name PHP stood for "personal home page," but it now stands for the self-referring acronym "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor."