Programming Languages Timeline

By Desmos10

  • Plankalkul

    Year: 1948
    Who Developed It: Konrad Zuse
    Purpose: engineering purposes
    Acronym: Plan Calculus

  • Fortran

    Year: 1950
    Who Developed It: John Backus
    Purpose: for scientists and engineers
    Acronym: FORmula TRANslation

  • Delphi

    Year: 1955
    Who Created It: Borland
    Purpose: provide database connectivity to programmers
    Acronym: None

  • MATH-MATIC

    Year: 1957
    Who Developed It: Charles Katz and his group
    Purpose: a better version of Fortran
    Acronym: None

  • Lisp

    Year: 1958
    Who Developed It: John McCarthy
    Purpose: practical mathematical notation for computer programs
    Acronym: the name came from LISt Processing

  • RPG

    Year: 1959
    Who Developed It: IBM
    Purpose: to be used by punched card machines
    Acronym: Report Program Generator

  • COBOL

    Year: 1959
    Who Created It: Grace Hopper
    Purpose: to be used for business
    Acronym: Common Business-Oriented Language

  • BASIC

    Year: 1964
    Who Developed It: John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz
    Purpose: allow all students to use computers
    Acronym: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

  • LOGO

    Year: 1967
    Who Developed It: Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert
    Purpose: to be used for teaching
    Acronym: None

  • B

    Year: 1969
    Who Developed It: Ken Thompson with Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs
    Purpose: Recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications
    Acronym: came from BCPL

  • PASCAL

    Year: 1970
    Who Developed It: Niklaus Wirth
    Purpose: a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring
    Acronym: None

  • C

    Year: 1969-1973 at AT&T Bell Labs
    Who Developed It: Dennis Ritchie
    Purpose: re-implement the Unix operating system;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
    Acronym: None

  • ML

    Year: 1973
    Who developed It: Robin Milner & others at the University of Edinburgh
    Purpose: to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover
    Acronym: metalanguage

  • SQL

    Year: 1974
    Who Developed It: ISO/IEC
    Purpose: managing data held in a relational database management system
    Acronym: Structured Query Language

  • ADA

    Year: early 1980s
    Who Developed It: Dr. Jean Ichbiah, andAugusta Ada Lovelace, a mathematician who is sometimes regarded as the world’s first programmer because of her work with Charles Babbage.
    Purpose: large, long-lived applications
    Acronym: None

  • C++

    Year: 1983
    Who Developed It: Bjarne Stroustrup
    Purpose: make writing good programs easier and more pleasant for the individual programmer
    Acronym: C language with more additions

  • Python

    Year: 1991
    Who Developed It: Guido van Rossum
    Purpose: programmer productivity and code readability
    Acronym: None

  • Visual Basic

    Year: 1991
    Who Developed It: Microsoft
    Purpose: A programmer can create an application
    Acronym: None

  • PHP

    Year: 1995
    Who Developed It: Rasmus Lerdorf
    Purpose: for web development
    Acronym; PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

  • Java

    Year: 1995
    Who Developed It: James Gosling
    Purpose: to let application developers "write once, run anywhere"
    Acronym: None

  • Javascript

    Year: 1995
    Who Developed It: Brendan Eich
    Purpose: for web browsers
    Acronym: none