Programming Languages Timline

Plankalkul

Jun 21, 1948

Year: 1948
Developer: Konrad Zuse
Purpose: engineering purposes
Acronym: German pronounciation for "Plan Calculus"

Fortran

Jun 21, 1957

Year: 1957
Developer; John Backus
Purpose: especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing
Acronym: previously FORTRAN, derived from Formula Translating System

MATH-MATIC

Jun 21, 1957

Year: 1957
Developer: Charles Katz
Purpose: Intended as an improvement over FORTRAN
Acronym: none

Lisp

Jun 21, 1958

Year: 1958
Developer: John McCarthy
Purpose: originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs
Acronym: derives from "LISt Processing"

COBOL

Jun 21, 1959

Year: 1959
Developer: Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney
Purpose: business use
Acronym: common business-oriented language

RPG

Jun 21, 1959

Year: 1959
Developer: IBM
Purpose: created for punched card machines
Acronym: Report Program Generator

BASIC

Jan 1, 1964

Year: 1964
Developer: John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz
Purpose: enable fields other than science and math the ability to use computers
Acronym: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

LOGO

Jun 21, 1967

Year: 1967
Developer: Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert
Purpose: educational programming language
Acronym: derived from the Greek logos meaning word or "thought"

B

Jan 1, 1969

Year: 1969
Developer: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
Purpose: designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications, such as system and language software
Acronym: contraction of BCPL

C

Jun 21, 1969

Year: 1969 and 1973
Developer: Dennis Ritchie
Purpose: used to (re-)implement the Unix operating system
Acronym: none

PASCAL

Jun 21, 1970

Year: 1970
Developer: Niklaus Wirth
Purpose: designed for object-oriented programming
Acronym: named in honor of the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal

ML

Jun 21, 1973

Year: 1973
Developer: Robin Milner
Purpose: conceived to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover
Acronym: Metalanguage

ADA

Jan 1, 1977

Year: 1977 to 1983
Developer: Jean Ichbiah and his team
Purpose: to supersede original programming languages used by the DoD
Acronym: named after Ada Lovelace

SQL

Jun 21, 1979

Year: 1979
Developer: Raymond Boyce and Donald Chamberlin
Purpose: used to query, insert, update and modify data
Acronym: Structured Query Language

C++

Jun 21, 1983

Year: 1983
Developer: Bjarne Stroustrup
Purpose: general purpose
Acronym: none

Python

Jun 21, 1991

Year: 1991
Developer: Guido van Rossum
Purpose: express concepts in fewer lines of code
Acronym: derived from the television series Monty Python's Flying Circus

Visual Basic

Jun 21, 1991

Year: 1991
Developer: Microsoft
Purpose: enables the rapid application development of graphical user interface applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects
Acromyn: derived from BASIC

Delphi

Jun 21, 1995

Year: 1995
Developer: Borland
Purpose: native code compiler
Acronym: none

Java

Jun 21, 1995

Year: 1995
Developer: James Gosling
Purpose: designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible
Acronym: none

Javascript

Jun 21, 1995

Year: 1995
Developers: Brendan Eich
Purpose: allow client-side scripts to interact with the user, control the browser, communicate asynchronously, and alter the document content that is displayed
Acronym: none

PHP

Jun 21, 1995

Year: 1995
Developer: Rasmus Lerdorf
Purpose: web development
Acronym: originally stood for Personal Home Page, it now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, which is a recursive backronym