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Plankalkül
Plankalkül was one of the first programming languages ever made, and the first high-level programming language. It was made by German engineer Konrad Zuse and was designed to be used for engineering purposes. Which can be obvious to those who can understand German, as "plankalkül" can mean either "plan calculus" or "plan calculations" -
Fortran
Designed in 1957 by John Backus while at IBM. Fortran (standing for "FORmula TRANslation) was made for scientific and engineering purposes. -
MATH-MATIC
While most people will call this language "MATH-MATIC," it was actually called AT-3 (Algebraic Translator 3.) It was designed to be like FLOW-MATIC, with the team at Remington Rand being lead by Charles Katz, and under the directions of Grace Hopper (remember her name.) -
Lisp
The LISt Processor (LISP) was created by John McCarthy as a practical math notation based off of Alonzo Church's idea of Lambda Calculus. -
RPG
Not to be confused with the Rocket Propelled Grenade, the Report Program Generator was designed at IBM in order to be used for general business applications. Though today, it's used only on IBM's IBM i and OS/400 operating systems. -
COBOL
The COmmon Business-Orientated Language was created at the request of the Department of Defense wanting a program language that was capable of playing the same data processing programs on different computers. It was made by the COnference on DAta System Languages (CODASYL,) with it being lead by Grace Hopper (sound familiar?) As well as being based of Hopper's previous design ideas. -
BASIC
John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz made the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code while at Dartmouth College. Based off of IBM's Fortran, it was made to be used for those outside of math and science fields. Focusing on being simple and easy to use. -
LOGO
Being mostly known for turtle graphics, Wally Feurzei, Seymour Papet, and Cynnthia Solomon created LOGO. It was based off of LISP. -
B
While at Bell Labs, Ken Thompson and Dennis Richtie (another important name) created B off of BCPL in order to design applicatons that wouldn't relay on what machine it was being ran off of. -
PASCAL
Named after French mathematician Blaise Pascal, this general purpose language was made by Niklaus Wirth. And has inspired several other languages, Ada, Go, and Java to name a few. -
C
3 years after B, Dennis Ritchie created C in order to create utilities on the Unix kernal. Just like PASCAL, C also inspired several implementations of the language, like C#, C++, Perl, and PHP. -
ML
While at the University of Edinburgh, Robin Milner created the Meta Language. A general purpose language which was created to develop proof tactics for the LCF theorem prover. The language the prover used, pplambda, had ML as a metalanguage, hence the name. -
SQL
First created because the ISO and IEC wanted a langauge that would maniulate and retrive data being held at IBM's System R. SQL (Structured Query Language) is now used for all types of databases. -
Ada
Named after Ada Lovelace, Ada extended off from PASCAL. It was created by Jean Ichbiah as a replacement for the 450 languages the Department of Defense used at the time. -
C++
Initially "C with Classes" Bjarne Stroustrup created C++ for system programming and embedded software. Having efficiency and flexibility as it's main design philosophy. C++ gets it's name from the ++ operator, which indicates to increment an integer (i.e. x could equal to 1, but adding the ++ operator later would increase x's value to 2.) -
Python
Guido van Rossum created Python as a means to create clear, logical code that emphasized code readability. It's general usage means it can and is used everywhere. From GUI to machine learning. It's also the best language on this list, and you can't change my mind on that. -
Visual Basic
Based off of BASIC, VB was made to be easy to learn and use with a drag and drop user interface. And although the last VB version was released in 1998, it's successor, Visual Basic.NET was released in 2001. -
Delphi
Initially developed by Borland before being developed by Embarcadero Technologies, Delphi was made to be the sucessor of Turbo Pascal. -
Java
Created by James Gosling at Sun Microsystem. It was originally called "Oak" for a platform called "Green." Before being renamed to Java after learning that a trademark was already on "Oak" by Oak Technology. It was made to have as little dependencies as possible in order for to be ran on as many platforms as it could. Which seems to work as over 3 billion devices use Java. -
Javascript
While having nothing to do with Java (in fact, it was called Mocha before hand,) Javascript was to be a "glue language" that would be embedded along side HTML so designers would be able to create components and interactions on their websites by Brendan Eich. It was inspired by Scheme, a LISP dialect and Self. -
PHP
The Personal Home Page language was initially created by Rasmus Lerdorf as a web development language before later becoming general purpose.