Programming Languages Timeline

  • Plankalkul

    First published by Konrad Zuse and was the world's first complete high level language.
  • Fortran

    Developed by IBM programmers led by John Backus. Acronym for FORmula TRANslation being that it was designed for easy translation of math formulas into code.
  • MATH-MATIC

    Developed by Grace Hopper and provided algebraic-style expressions and floating-point arithmetic.
  • Lisp

    Developed by John McCarthy and designed as a mathematical formalism for reasoning about the use of recursion equations.
  • COBOL

    Developed by Grace Hopper. Reads like regular english and more so used for business and administrative purposes.
  • RPG

    Developed by IBM and generates informative large scale reports from mainframe databases.
  • BASIC

    Developed by John G. Kemeney and Thomas E. Kurtz. Basic allows a wide range of applications.
  • LOGO

    Developed by Seymour Papert and originally designed to introduce kids to programming concepts.
  • B

    Developed at Bells Lab circa by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Designed for non-numeric applications which is system programming.
  • PASCAL

    Named in honor of Blaise Pascal but was developed by Niklaus Wirth to teach structured programming.
  • C

    Developed by Dennis M. Ritchie. Contained a powerful mix of high level functionality and detailed features to program a operating system.
  • ML

    Developed by Robin Milner, stands for metalanguage, and designed to implement a automatic theorem solver.
  • SQL

    Abbreviation for Structured Query Language, developed by IBM, and designed to store, manipulate, and query data stored in relational databases.
  • C++

    Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup. Designed to make writing good programs easier.
  • ADA

    Developed by Augusta Ada Lovelace and designed for long-lived applications and embedded systems.
  • Visual Basic

    Developed by the Microsoft Corporation in 1990 and intended for application development.
  • Python

    Designed by Guido van Rossum, usable as an extension language for applications that need programming interfaces, and portable across major hardware and software platforms.
  • Delphi

    Developed by bordland and is a native code compiler.
  • Java

    Developed by James Gosling and designed to be compiled to a bytecode.
  • JavaScript

    Developed by Netscape and started as a scripting language.
  • PHP

    Recursive acronym for Hypertext Processor, developed by Rasmus Lerdorf, and capable of database interaction and providing a framework to develop applications such as guestbooks.