Programming Languages Timeline

  • Plankalkül

    This is a German programming language created by Konrad Zuse. Designed for engineering purposes. First high-level programming language to be designed for a computer. Name in English translates to Plan Calculus.
  • MATH-MATIC

    Written by a team led by Charles Katz under the direction of Grace Hopper. Doesn't emphasise execution speed of complied programs.
  • FORTRAN

    Created by a team led by John Backus. Allowed easy translation of math formulas into code. Acronym for formula translator
  • Lisp

    The inventor of this language was John McCarthy. The best known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp and Scheme. Acronym for List Processing.
  • COBOL

    Grace Murray Hopper was the creator of this language. Often used for business and administrative purposes. Acronym for Common Business Oriented Language, means format that is no longer used or supported by new systems.
  • RPG

    There is no specific creator of this language but IBM had founded it. Used for business applications. RPG, in programming, in an acronym for Report Program Generator.
  • BASIC

    Invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. Used in many business applications. Acronym for Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
  • LOGO

    Creators included Wally Feurzeig, Cynthia Solomon, and Seymour Papert. An educational programming language derived for the Greek word "logos" meaning "thought".
  • B

    Created and designed by K.L. Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Primarily used for non-numeric applications.
  • PASCAL

    Niklaus Wirth is the creator of this programming language. Intended to encourage good programming practices. PASCAL stands for Philips Automatic Sequence Calculator.
  • ML

    The creator would be Robin Milner. Used heavily in programming language research and has roots in Lisp. ML is an acronym for Meta Language.
  • C

    Designed by Dennis Ritchie. Used for system programming in implementing operating systems and embedded system applications.
  • SQL

    Was designed by Donald D Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce. SQL is used for managing relational databases and performing various operations on the data in them. An acronym for Structured Query Language.
  • ADA

    Designed by Jean Ichbiah, Primarily for large and long-lived applications.
  • C++

    Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup. Object-oriented programming language that has all the features of C.
  • Python

    Created and implemented by Guido van Rossum. Is a general purpose programming language that's used everyday. Named after Monty Python
  • Visual Basic

    Originally developed by Alan Cooper which was further developed by his associates under Microsoft. To create a programming environment where the programmer uses a GUI to choose and change sections of BASIC code. Also known as VB for short.
  • PHP

    The designer is Rasmus Lerdorf. Suited for server-side web development and usually runs on a web server. PHP is an acronym for Hypertext Preprocessor.
  • Delphi

    The chief architect was ANders Hejlsberg. Supports rapid application development. Supposed to be a temporary code name but it stayed.
  • Java

    Originally developed by James Gosling. Designed to look and feel like C++ but similar to use.
  • Javascript

    Eich was the creator of Javascript. Most commonly used as a client side scripting language. Developed under the name Mocha it was officially called LiveScript in beta releases.