Programming Language Timeline

  • Plankalkul

    Konrad Zuse
    Created for engineering purposes
    Literal English meaning, “Formal system for planning”
  • FORTRAN

    John Backus IBM
    Formula Translation
    Made for easy translation of math formulas into code
  • MATH-MATIC

    Charles Katz
    Created to be an improvement over FORTRAN
  • Lisp

    John McCarthy
    Identified commonly used functions as part of the language instead of part of a library extension. Programs easily portable
    List Processing
  • COBOL

    Common Business Oriented Language
    Created by Conference on Data Systems Languages
    Used to allow early computers to communicate with each other
  • RPG

    Designed for business applications and mainframe MIS environments
    Report Program Generator
    Developed by IBM
  • Logo

    Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon
    An educational programming language
  • B

    Made for non-numeric applications such as system programming
    Dennis Ritchie & Ken Thompson
    Name originated from BCPL
  • ML

    Meta Language
    General purpose language, roots in Lisp
    Robin Milner
  • PASCAL

    Niklaus Wirth
    Made to teach users structured progrmming
    Named after 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal
  • SQL

    Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce
    Structure Query Language
    Used to communicate with a database
  • C

    Dennis Ritchie
    Meant to provide a variety of data types
  • C++

    Bjarne Stroustrup
    An extension of C language
  • ADA

    Named after Ada Byron
    Designed for large, long-lived applications, and embedded systems
    Dr. Jean Ichbiah
  • Python

    Guido van Rossum
    General purpose designed to be readable and easy to learn
    Named after Monty Python
  • Visual Basic

    Alan Cooper Microsoft
    Provided a graphical programming environment for developing user interfaces
  • PHP

    Rasmus Lerdorf
    Personal Home Page Hypertext Preprocessor
    General purpose for server side development
  • Delphi

    Borland Software Company
    Object oriented, visual programming approach to developing applications
    Name inspired by Greek oracle called a “Delphi
  • Java

    James Gosling
    General purpose, concurrent, object oriented, class based, and designed to have minimal implementation dependencies
    Original name Mocha
  • JavaScript

    Brendan Eich
    Supports object oriented and procedural programming, and control webpages from the client side of the browser