Programming Languages Timeline

By SnowfallDiary

  • Plankalkül

    Inventors: Konrad Zuse
    Purpose: Engineering purposes
    Name Meaning: "formal system for planning" in German

  • Fortran

    Inventors: John Backus
    Purpose: Numeric computation and scientific computing
    Name Meaning: Formula Translation

  • MATH-MATIC

    Inventors: Remington Rand
    Purpose: Business applications
    Name Meaning:

  • Lisp

    Inventors: John McCarthy
    Purpose: Artificial Intelligence research
    Name Meaning: LISt Processor

  • COBOL

    Inventors: Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney
    Purpose: Business, finance, and administrative systems
    Name Meaning: Common business-oriented language

  • RPG

    Inventors: IBM
    Purpose: Tool to replicate punch card processing on IBM computers.
    Name Meaning: Report Program Generator

  • BASIC

    Inventors: John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz
    Purpose: Allowed students in non-STEM majors at Dartmouth College to use personal computers.
    Name Meaning: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

  • Logo

    Inventors: Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon
    Purpose: Teach programming concepts related to Lisp
    Name Meaning: Derived from the greek word logos

  • B

    Inventors: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
    Purpose: Recursive, non-numeric, and machine-independent applications.
    Name Meaning: A contraction of BCPL, an older programming language.

  • PASCAL

    Inventors: Niklaus Wirth
    Purpose: Designed to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.
    Name Meaning:

  • C

    Inventors: Dennis Ritchie
    Purpose: Provide low-level access to memory and language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions, all with minimal runtime support.
    Name Meaning: None

  • ML

    Inventors: Robin Milner
    Purpose: Programming language research
    Name Meaning: Meta Language

  • SQL

    Inventors: Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce
    Purpose: Managing data held in a database
    Name Meaning: Structured Query Language

  • Ada

    Inventors: Jean Ichbiah
    Purpose: To replace the over 450 programming languages used by the Department of Defense at the time.
    Name Meaning: Named after Ada Lovelace.

  • C++

    Inventors: Bjarne Stroustrup
    Purpose: System programming and embedded, resource-constrained software and systems.
    Name Meaning: C with Classes

  • Python

    Inventors: Guido van Rossum
    Purpose: Code readability and to help programmers write clear, logical code for projects.
    Name Meaning:

  • Delphi

    Inventors: Danny Thorpe
    Purpose: Dialect of Pascal, and intended to be easy to use.
    Name Meaning: Oracle at Delphi

  • Java

    Inventors: James Gosling
    Purpose: Intended for developers to write their code once and allow it to run on any platform
    Name Meaning: Java coffee

  • Javascript

    Inventors: Brendan Eich
    Purpose: Enables interactive webpages
    Name Meaning:

  • PHP

    Inventors: Rasmus Lerdorf
    Purpose: Web development
    Name Meaning: PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

  • Visual Basic

    Inventors: Microsoft
    Purpose: Derived from BASIC to enable GUI-based applications.
    Name Meaning: BASIC with visuals