Programming Languages Timeline

  • Plankalkul

    Designed by Konrad Zuse, it's Primary purpose is for engineering projects. It was the first high level programming language
  • Fortran

    Designed by John Backus, It's primary purpose was numeric computation and scientific computing, serving in fields such as weather and chemistry.
  • MATH-MATIC

    Designed by Grace Hopper, this language was intended as an improvement over Fortran, and was used with the UNIVAC I & II.
  • Lisp

    Designed by John McCarthy, it's main uses were in mathematical notation and artificail intelligence. LISP is a stand in for LISt Processing.
  • COBOL

    Designed by Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, and Gertrude Tierney, this programming language is mostly used for businesses. COBOL stands for COmmon Business-Oriented Language
  • RPG

    Developed by IBM, this programming languages major use was to replace the punch card system of the IBM 1401. RPG stands for Report Program Generator.
  • Basic

    Designed by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz, this programming language was mainly focused on ease of use for beginners. BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
  • LOGO

    Designed by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert, this programming language was remembered mainly for it's turtle graphics.
  • B

    Developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, this programming language focuses on system and language software.
  • PASCAL

    Developed by Niklaus Wirth, this programming language was general purpose and was made to encourage good programming practices
  • C

    Designed by Dennis Ritchie, this is a general purpose programming language.
  • ML

    Designed by Robin Milner & others at the University of Edinburgh, this programming language is remembered for it's work on Hindley–Milner type inference algorithms. ML stands for metalanguage.
  • SQL

    Designed by Donald D. Chamberlin & Raymond F. Boyce, this programming language was designed for managing data held in a relational database management system. SQL stands for Structured Query Language
  • ADA

    Designed originally by Jean Ichbiah, ADA was made to supersede the hundreds of programming languages then used by the DoD.
  • C++

    Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup, this programming language is a general prupose language biased towards system programming.
  • Python

    Designed by Guido van Rossum, Python is a general purpose programming language focused on ease of use and readablity.
  • Visual Basic

    Developed by Microsoft, Visual Basic is a programming lanugage focused on rapid application developement of GUI inteface applications. It stemmed from BASIC, which stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It is also the language we will be using in this class.
  • Delphi

    Designed originally by Borland, Delphi is and integrated development environment (IDE) with multi-platform support.
  • Java

    Developed by James Gosling, Java is a general purpose programming language that focuses on the philosophy of WORA, or "write once, read anywhere".
  • Javascript

    Designed by Brendan Eich, Javascript is a language focused on developement for content on the World Wide Web.
  • PHP

    Designed by Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP is a server side web development language. PHP stood for Personal Home Page originally, but now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.