A Brief History of Programming Languages

  • Plankalkul

    Created by Konrad Zuse for engineering purposes. Translates to "Plan Calculus" in english.
  • Fortran

    Created by John Backus as a general-purpose language. Stands for FORmula TRANslating system.
  • MATH-MATIC

    Created by Charles Katz to compile.
  • Lisp

    Created by John McCarthy as a general-purpose coding language.
  • COBOL

    Created by Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, and Gertrude Tierney. Was created for business use. Stands for COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
  • RPG

    Created by IBM, RPG was a business-oriented coding language. It stands for Report Program Generator.
  • BASIC

    Created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, BASIC was prized with its ease-of-use. It stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
  • LOGO

    Created by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert as an educational coding language.
  • B

    Created by Ken Thompson, this was an all-around system language.
  • PASCAL

    Created by Niklaus Wirth to promote good programming practices.
  • C

    Created by Dennis Ritchie, and prized for its structured programming format.
  • ML

    Created by Robin Milner as a general-purpose coding language.
  • SQL

    Created by Donald D. Chamberlain and Raymond F. Boyce to process queries. Also known as the Structured Query Language.
  • ADA

    Created by Jean Ichbiah, this language was used to supersede the hundreds of programming languages used by the DoD. It was named after Ada Lovelace, the first programmer.
  • C++

    Created by Bjarne Stroustrup, and became the fist constantly-evolving coding language.
  • Python

    Created by Guido van Rossum as a general-purpose coding language.
  • Virtual Basic

    Created by Microsoft, it was prized as an easy-to-learn coding language.
  • Delphi

    Created by Borland, this language was used for graphical applications.
  • Java

    Created by James Gosling as a general-use coding language.
  • Javascript

    Created by Brendan Eich for usage on the web.
  • PHP

    Created by Rasmis Lerdorf for web design.