Programming Languages Timeline

By Shawn04

  • Plankalkul

    Plankalkul
    Developed in 1945 by German computer engineer Konrad Zuse following his ideas on how machines could be programmed in a more powerful way after seeing how the language for his Z4 computer was too complicated to be easily used

  • Fortran

    Fortran
    In 1957, a team of IBM programmers led by John Backus developed Fortran (acronym for Formula Translation) to allow for the easy translation of math formulas to code

  • MATH-MATIC

    MATH-MATIC
    Developed in 1957 by Charles Katz and his team to be an improvement of Fortran

  • Lisp

    Lisp
    Developed in 1958 by John McCarthy at MIT to be a mathematical approach to programming; Lisp is an acronym for list processing

  • COBOL

    COBOL
    A team led by Grace Hopper developed COBOL (acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language) in 1959 to be a common language that would reduce costs of translating computer programs for new hardware

  • RPG

    RPG
    Developed by IBM in the 1959 for developing business applications; RPG is an acronym for Report Program Generator

  • BASIC

    BASIC
    Mathematicians John George Kemeny and Tom Kurtzas developed BASIC (acronym for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) at Dartmouth College in 1963 as a teaching tool for undergraduates

  • LOGO

    LOGO
    A team led by Wallace Feurzeig first created LOGO in 1967 to be a tool for learning; LOGO is an acronym for Logic Oriented Graphic Oriented

  • ML

    ML
    Standing for meta-language, ML was developed in the early 1970s by Robin Milner to improve their previous project, the LCF (Logic for Computable Functions), an automated theorem prover

  • PASCAL

    PASCAL
    Developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a way to teach programming techniques; PASCAL’s name comes from French mathematician Blaise Pascal

  • SQL

    SQL
    Developed by Raymond F. Boyce and Donald D. Chamberlin in the 1970s for relational calculus and algebra; SQL is an acronym for Structured Query Language

  • B

    B
    In 1971, D. M. Ritchie and K. L. Thompson developed B for non-numeric applications; B is short for and inherits from BCPL (acronym for Basic Combined Programming Language)

  • C

    C
    Developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie to be a language used for general applications; inherits features from B and BCPL

  • C++

    C++
    Starting in 1979, Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup began developing C++ (called C with classes until 1983) as an extension of C, with new features

  • ADA

    ADA
    A team led by Dr. Jean Ichbiah developed ADA in CII-Honeywell-Bull, France in the early 1980s to be a general-purpose language used for a variety of needs

  • Python

    Python
    First developed by Guido van Rossum in 1991 and later developed by the Python Software Foundation to improve code readability and allow programmers to use less code to express certain concepts

  • Visual Basic

    Visual Basic
    Developed in 1991 by Alan Cooper at his company, Tripod for Microsoft made to be easy to use and learn

  • PHP

    PHP
    Developed in in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf to originally track visits to his online resume; PHP’s name originally came from Personal Home Page Tools but is now an acronym for Hypertext Preprocessor

  • Delphi

    Delphi
    Developed by Anders Hejlsberg in 1995 to be an extension of Hejlsberg’s Turbo Pascal language

  • Java

    Java
    Beginning as a project called “Oak” in 1991, Java was first named in 1995 by James Gosling to create a language similar to but simpler and more uniform than C/C++

  • Javascript

    Javascript
    Developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich to be an improved version of Java as part of a contract by Netscape