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Programming Languages

By Michael Barger

  • Plankalkul

    Plankalkul, meaning "Plan Calculus", is a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse. It was the first high-level non-von Neumann programming language to be designed for a computer.

  • Fortran

    Fortran is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing developed by IBM. FORTRAN used to stand for FORmula TRANslating System.

  • MATH-MATIC

    Created by a group led by Charles Katz in 1957; MATH-MATIC was an early programming language for the UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II. It was intended as an improvement over FORTRAN.

  • Lisp

    Lisp was created by John McCarthy while he was at MIT. It was originally intended for practical mathematical notation for computer programs but quickly became popular in the creation of artificial intelligence. Lisp stands for "LISt Processing."

  • COBOL

    COBOL was designed in 1959 by the Conference on Data Systems Languages in an effort to create a portable programming language for data processing (buisiness applications). COBOL is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language.

  • RPG

    RPG was developed by IBM in 1959 as the Report Program Generator, with the same functionality as a punched card processing system.

  • BASIC

    John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original BASIC language. They wanted to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn.

  • LOGO

    Logo was created in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a Cambridge, Massachusetts research firm, by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert for use in artificial intelligence, mathematical logic and developmental psychology. "Logo" is not an acronym. It was derived from the Greek logos meaning word or "thought" by Feurzeig to distinguish itself from other programming languages that were primarily numbers, not graphics or logic, oriented.

  • B

    B was developed by Ken Thompson with Dennis Ritchie. It was created for non-numeric, machine independent applications, such as system and language software.

  • PASCAL

    Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth and was intended to teach students structured programming. It was named in honor of the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.

  • C

    C was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs. it was originally created to re-implement the Unix operating system from machine code to something easier to understand.

  • ML

    ML was developed by Robin Milner and others in at the University of Edinburgh to be a general purpose language. ML stands for metalanguage.

  • SQL

    SQL was developed at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce to manipulate and retrieve data stored in IBM's original database management system. Its name stands for "Structured Query Language" but it was originally named SEQUEL for "Structured English QUEry Language" but had to be changed due to the name already being trademarked by a UK aircraft company.

  • ADA

    Ada was originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede the hundreds of programming languages then used by the DoD. Ada was named after Ada Lovelace

  • C++

    C++ was designed and developed by Bjarne Stroustrup. He wanted a fast program with some capabilities that C didn't offer. He took some of Simula's features and added it to C, renaming his creation to C++ (++ being the increment operator in C.)

  • Python

    Python was created to be a general purpose language by Guido van Rossum as a "hobby" programming project that "would keep me occupied during the week around Christmas." It was called Python because the creator was "in a slightly irreverent mood (and a big fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus)."

  • Visual Basic

    Visual Basic was a third-generation language created by Microsoft and was intended to be relatively easy to learn and use. It enables the "rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications."

  • Delphi

    Delphi was originally developed by Borland as a way to quickly create applications for Windows. The name is supposed to symbolise how, at the time, it was used by programmers to access the Oracle Database, and there is a saying that "If you want to talk to [the] Oracle, go to Delphi" referenceing the Oracle at Delphi from Greek mythology.

  • Java

    Java was written and intended to let application developers "write once, run anywhere" by James Gosling and Sun Microsystems. The name came from Java Coffee.

  • Javascript

    Javascript was developed by Brendan Eich, while he was working for Netscape Communications Corporation. The name Javascript was a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript more starting popularity by it being named similarly to the still new Java language. Javascript was intended to be able to be used by non-proffesional programmers with possibly small amounts of programming knowledge while Java was geared towards experienced programmers.

  • PHP

    PHP was designed by Rasmus Lerdorf for use in webpages and mixes well with HTM.While PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page,[5] it now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.