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Fortran
People: John Backus and IBM
Purpose: General purpose, but its used especially for numeric computation and scientific computing.
Meaning: Name derived from Formula Translation -
MATH-MATIC
People: Remington Rand
Purpose: Math and business related programs, including algebraic expressions and arithmetic. -
Lisp
People: John McCarthy
Purpose: Originally created as a practical mathematical notation, but later became the favored language for AI research.
Meaning: LISP comes from LISt Processor -
COBOL
People: CODASYL, ANSI, ISO (all teams of people)
Purpose: Designed for business use
Meaning: Common Business-Oriented Language -
RPG
People: IBM
Purpose: High-level programming language for business use. -
BASIC
People: John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz
Purpose: General purpose
Meaning: Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code -
LOGO
People: Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon
Purpose: Educational programming and general purpose, but known for its use of turtle graphics.
Meaning: Comes from the Greek word logos, which means word or thought. -
B
People: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
Purpose: Designed for system and language software.
Meaning: Derived from BCPL -
PASCAL
People: Niklaus Wirth
Purpose: Imperative and Procedural programming
Meaning: Named after Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, philosopher and physicist. -
C
People: Dennis Ritchie and Bell Labs
Purpose: General purpose, one of the most widely used programming languages -
Plankalkul
People: Konrad Zuse
Purpose: Engineering programming
Meaning: Plankalkul means formal system for planning in German.
Note about date: Plankalkul was designed in 1948, but was not created until 1972. -
ML
People: Robin Milner and others at University of Edinburgh
Purpose: General purpose, but used in programming language research.
Meaning: Stands for Meta Language -
SQL
People: Donald D. Chamberlin, Raymond F. Boyce
Purpose: Designed for managing data, domain-specific language.
Meaning: SQL stands for Structured Query Language -
ADA
People: Team led by Jean Ichbiah, later updates by Tucker Taft
Purpose: Development of large software systems, but also for general development.
Meaning: ADA is named after Ada Lovelace -
C++
People: Bjarne Stroustrup
Purpose: General Purpose, designed with bias towards system programming
Meaning: Designed as an extension of C -
Delphi
People: Originally Borland Software Corporation, Later Embarcadero Technologies
Purpose: IDE for Desktop, Mobile, Web and Console -
Python
People: Guido van Rossum
Purpose: High-level programming language for general purpose.
Meaning: Name came from Rossum's love of Monty Python. -
Visual Basic
People: Microsoft
Purpose: Event-driven programming language, intended to be easy to learn and use
Meaning: Name comes from the BASIC language, another language intended to be easy to learn and use. -
Java
People: James Gosling at Sun Microsystems, now Oracle Corporation
Purpose: General purpose, but used especially for client-server web applications
Meaning: Name comes from Java coffee -
JavaScript
People: Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications, Mozzilla Foundation, Ecma International
Purpose: General web page content, one of the three core website languages, along with HTML and CSS.
Other: Often associated with Java, but the two are vastly different. -
PHP
People: Rasmus Lerdorf and Zend Technologies
Purpose: Web development and general purpose
Meaning: Originally, Personal Home Page, but now stands for PHP; Hypertext Preprocessor