Programming Languages Timeline

  • Plankalkül

    Developed by Konrad Zuse
    Made for engineering purposes
  • MATH-MATIC

    Develpoed by Charles Katz and his team.
    made as an improvement of Fortran
  • Fortran

    Develpoed by John W. Backus
    created to be a more practical alternative to assembly language for programming IBM's IBM 704 mainframe computer.
    The name is a blend derived from The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System
  • Lisp

    Developed by Steve Russell, Timothy P. Hart, and Mike Levin
    John McCarthy, (Lisp inventor) showed that with a few simple operators and a notation for functions, one can build a Turing-complete language for algorithms.
  • RPG

    Developed by IBM
    Created for punched card machines
  • COBOL part. II

    the first version of COBOL.
    Acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language
  • COBOL

    created during the second half of 1959 by Grace Hopper, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney, Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, and Jean E. Sammet.
    A meeting chaired by Charles A. Phillips was held at the Pentagon on May 28 and 29 of 1959. There it was decided to set up three committees: short, intermediate and long range. It was the Short Range Committee, chaired by Joseph Wegstein of the US National Bureau of Standards, that during the following months created a description of
  • BASIC

    Designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz.
    They wanted to let 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 do.
    BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
  • Logo

    Developed by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert
    made to create a math land were kids could play with words and sentences
  • Pascal

    Developed by Niklaus Wirth.
    Initially it was made to teach students structured programming.
  • B

    Developed circa. 1969.
    Developed by Ken Thompson, with contributions from Dennis Ritchie.
    Essentially the BCPL stripped of anything that Thompson felt he could do without, in order to make it fit within the memory capacity of the minicomputers of the time.
  • C

    developed by Dennis Ritchie
    Designed to be compiled using a relatively straightforward compiler, to provide low-level access to memory, to provide language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions, and to require minimal run-time support.
  • ML

    Developed by Robin Milner
    made to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover
  • SQL

    Developed by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce
    designed to manipulate and retrieve data stored in IBM's original quasi-relational database management system
    acronym for Structured Query Language
  • Ada

    originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah. Then Tucker Taft.
    In the 70's, the US Department of Defense was worried about the number of different programming languages being used for its embedded computer system projects. The result was Ada.
    Named after Ada Lovelace, who was considered the first programmer. (Born Ada Byron)
  • Period: to

    Ada

    originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah. Then Tucker Taft.
    In the 70's, the US Department of Defense was worried about the number of different programming languages being used for its embedded computer system projects. The result was Ada.
    Named after Ada Lovelace, who was considered the first programmer. (Born Ada Byron)
  • C++

    Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup
    Stroudtrup wanted to creat a programming language because of his experience in programming for his Ph.D. thesis.
  • Python

    Made by Guido van Rossum
    Created as a succesor to the ABC language.
  • Visual Basic

    Developed by Alan Cooper
    created to develop Tripod into a programmable form system for Windows 3.0
  • Delphi

    Chief creator was Anders Hejlsberg
    Delphi was originally developed by Borland as a rapid application development tool for Windows.
  • Java

    Developed by James Gosling
    Originally designed for interactive television, but it was too advanced for digital cable television at the time.
  • Javascript

    Developed by Brendan Eich
    NetScape wanted to make a programming language that appealed to non proffesional programmers
  • PHP

    Developed by Rasmus Lerdorf
    It was designed for web development.