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Plankalkul
Designed by Konrad Zuse. Primary purpose was to solve calculus problems. Stands for "Plan Calculus" (this is a german name). -
Fortran
Designed by John Backus. Primary purpose is for numeric and scientific computation. Name derived from "Formula Translation". -
MATH-MATIC
Designed by Remington Rand. Primary purpose was to provide algebraic-style expressions and floating-point arithmetic and arrays. Not an acronym. -
Lisp
Designed by John McCarthy. Primary purpose was to be a practical mathematical notation for computer programs. Could be an acronym for "list processing" but this is highly doubtful. -
COBOL
Designed by Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, and Gertrude Tierney. Its primary purpose was for business, finance, and administrative systems. COBOL stands for common business-oriented language. -
RPG
Designed by IBM. Primary purpose is for business applications. Possibly stands for "Report Program Generator". -
BASIC
Designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. It's primary purpose was to allow other students besides science and mathematics majors. BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. -
LOGO
Designed by Daniel G. Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. Primary purpose was to be an educational programming language that created line graphics. Not an acronym. -
B
Designed by D.M. Ritchie and K.L. Thompson. It's primary purpose is for non-numeric applications such as system programming. B was derived from BCPL and name could be a contraction of BCPL. -
PASCAL
Designed by Niklaus Wirth. Primary purpose was to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. Not an acronym. -
C
Designed by Dennis Ritchie. It's primary purpose was to be a general computer language that efficiently code to machine instructions. It is not an acronym. -
ML
Designed by Robin Milner. Primary purpose was for bioinformatics, financial systems, and applications with a genealogical database. Stands for "MetaLanguage". -
SQL
Designed by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce. Primary purpose is for managing data held in a relational database management system. Stands for "Structured Query Language". -
ADA
Created by a team led by Dr. Jean Ichbiah. It's primary purpose was to create large, long-lived applications and embedded systems. The name ADA is not an acronym. -
C++
Designed by Bjarne Stoustrup. It's primary purpose was for system programming and resource-constrained systems. Not an acronym. -
Visual Basic
Designed by Microsoft. Primary purpose is to be user-friendly and an easy to learn programming language (general-purpose). Not an acronym. -
Python
Designed by Guido van Rossum. Primary purpose is to be a general-purpose coding software that allowed programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than previous languages. Not an acronym. -
Delphi
Originally designed by Borland then taken over by Embarcadero Technologies. It's primary purpose is to design software for various operating system types. Not an acronym. -
PHP
Designed by Rasmus Lerdorf. Primary purpose is for server-side scripting. Stood for "Personal Home Page" and now is the recursive acronym of "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" -
Java
Designed by James Gosling. Primary purpose is to be a general-purpose programming language that didn't need recompilation to run on different platforms. Not an acronym. -
JavaScript
Designed by Brendan Eich. Primary purpose is to be used in web-based environments. Not an acronym.