Programming Languages Timeline

  • Plankalkul

    Konrad Zuse designed Plankalul for engineering purposes, and was the first high level programming language for a computer.
  • COBOL

    A committee of computer manufacturers and users and U.S. government organizations established COBOL to see the language standard in order to ensure its portability across diverse systems.
  • Fortran

    Combinations of the words Formula and Translation.
    John W. Backus made a proposal to his supervisors for another version for programming their mainframe.
  • Math-Matic

    Written by a team led by Charles Katz under orders of Grace Hopper
  • Lisp

    John McCarthy made a paper that showed, with a few operators and function notations you can make a language for algorithms.
  • RPG

    Originally created by IMB for matching record and sub-total reports and has evolved sense.
  • BASIC

    John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz created BASIC with the intent on making computers not just for people in math and science fields.
  • LOGO

    Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert. The goal was to create a "math land" for kids to mess around with words and sentences
  • B

    Made by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
    It is a stripped down version of BCPL to fit within the memory capacity of the microcomputers of the time
  • Pascal

    Developed by Niklaus Wirth to teach students programming.
    Named after philosopher Blaise Pascal.
  • C

    Develpoed by Dennis Rithcie at Bell Labs to re-implement Unix system.
  • ML

    Developed by Robert Miler at the university of Edinburgh, to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover.
  • SQL

    Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce to retrieve data stored in a database management system.
  • C++

    Danish COmputer scientist found that Stimula was too slow and BCPL was too low-level, he decided to make C grater by giving it Stimula features. The name "Signifies the evolutionary changes from C".
  • Visual Basic

    Microsoft made visual Basic to complete C++, Pascal and other languages.
  • Python

    Guido van Rossum made Python as a successor to ABC
  • Java

    James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton originally created Java for T.V but it was too advanced. They made it like C++ so programmers would feel comfortable.
  • Javascript

    Mosaic Communications employed NCSA Mosaic workers to make a web browser to overshadow NCSA Mosiac. The founder of the company believed that they needed a "glue language" that was easy for web designers to use that would allow them to make things like images and plug-ins.
  • Delphi

    Named after the Oracle of Delphi.
    Created by Embarcadero Technologies, o provide database connectivity to programmers
  • PHP

    Rasmus Lerdorf wrote Common Gateway Interface programs in C, then made them work with web forms to communicate with databases.