Programming Languages Timeline

Plankalkul

Jan 1, 1948

Year: 1948
Developed By: Konrad Zuse
Purpose: Designed for engineering purposes
Acronym: "Plan Calculus"

Fortran

Jan 1, 1955

Year: 1955
Developed By: A team of programmers at IBM led by John Backus
Purpose: To allow easy translation of math formulas into code
Acronym: FORmula TRANslation

MATH-MATIC

Jan 1, 1955

Year: 1955
Developed By: Charles Katz
Purpose: Meant to be an improvement over FORTRAN.
Acronym: None.

Lisp

Jan 1, 1958

Year: 1958
Developed By: John McCarthy
Purpose: Mathematical notation for computer programs.
Acronym: Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol

COBOL

Jan 1, 1959

Year: 1959
Developed By: CODASYL Committee
Purpose: Developing file-oriented applications for businesses.
Acronym: Common Business-Oriented Language

RPG

Jan 1, 1959

Year: 1959
Developed By: International Business Machines
Purpose: Use for business applications
Acronym: Report Program Generator

BASIC

Jan 1, 1964

Year: 1964
Developed By: John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz
Purpose: Designed as an interactive mainframe timesharing language.
Acronym: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

LOGO

Jan 1, 1967

Year: 1967
Developed By: Daniel G. Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon
Purpose: To teach mathematical ideas to children through learning computer programming.
Acronym: None

B

Jan 1, 1969

Year: 1969
Developed By: D. M. Ritchie and K. L. Thompson
Purpose: B's main purpose is system development
Acronym: Named after the B in BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language)

PASCAL

Jan 1, 1970

Year: 1970
Developed By: Niklaus Wirth
Purpose: Intended to encourage better programming practices by using structured programs and data structuring.
Acronym: None

C

Jan 1, 1972

Year: 1972
Developed By: Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan
Purpose: Use for developing system applications that form operation systems like Windows.
Acronym: None

ML

Jan 1, 1973

Year: 1973
Developed By: Robin Milner
Purpose: Characterizes programming languages by functional control structure.
Acronym: Meta Language

SQL

Jan 1, 1978

Year: 1978
Developed By: Donald D. Chamberlin, Raymond F. Boyce
Purpose: Managing data held in RDBMS.
Acronym: Structured Query Language

C++

Jan 1, 1979

Year: 1979
Developed By: Bjarne Stroustrup
Purpose: Used to write drivers and other softwares that rely on hardware under realtime constraints.
Acronym: C With Classes

ADA

Jan 1, 1980

Year: Early 1980s
Who Developed It: Dr. Jean Ichbiah and his team
Purpose: ADA was designed to be a general language for everything ranging from business applications to rocket guidance systems.
Acronym: None, was named after Ada Byron

Python

Jan 1, 1991

Year: 1991
Developed By: Guido van Rossum
Purpose: Allows programmers to use concepts in fewer lines of code than C++ or Java.
Acronym: None

Visual Basic

Jan 1, 1991

Year: 1991
Developed By: Microsoft
Purpose: Provides a graphical programming enironment and a paint metaphor for developing interfaces.
Acronym: None

PHP

Jan 1, 1994

Year: 1994
Developed By: Rasmus Lerdorf
Purpose: Used for web development.
Acronym: Hypertext Preprocessor

Delphi

Jan 1, 1995

Year: 1995
Developed By: Anders Hejlsberg
Purpose: Software development for desktop, mobile, web, and console applications.
Acronym: None

Java

Jan 1, 1995

Year: 1995
Developed By: Sun Microsystems
Purpose: Designed to be a platform independent language that could run on different systems.
Acronym:

Javascript

Jan 1, 1995

Year: 1995
Developed By: Brendan Eich
Purpose: Used to manipulate the web page elements and design
Acronym: None