Programming Languages Timeline

By Nick R

  • Plankalkul - 1948

    Designed by: Konrad Zuse
    Released in: 1948
    Purpose: Engineering purposes
    Acronym: Plan Calculus

  • Fortran - 1957

    Fortran was designed in 1957 by John Backus. The language's purpose is primarily for numeric computation and scientific computing. Fortran is derived from Formula Translation.

  • MATH-MATIC - 1957

    MATH-MATIC was designed by Remington Rand in 1957. MATH-MATIC served as an early programming language for the UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II. MATH-MATIC is the marketing name for the AT-3 (Algebraic Translator 3).

  • Lisp - 1958

    John McCarthy invented Lisp in 1958 while he was at MIT. Lisp serves many functions including research into AI, tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, etc. Lisp is derived from LISt Processor.

  • COBOL - 1959

    COBOL was originally designed in 1959 by CODASYL with the US Department's effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. COBOL stands for common business-oriented language.

  • RPG - 1959

    Developed by: IBM
    Released in: 1959
    Purpose: Business Applications
    Acronym: Report Program Generator

  • BASIC - 1964

    John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original basic code at Dartmouth College in 1964. They wanted students in other fields than science and mathematics to be able to use computers. BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

  • LOGO - 1967

    Logo was designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. Logo is most commonly used for its use of turtle graphics which commands for movement and drawing produced line graphics. LOGO is not an acronym.

  • B - 1969

    B was designed at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. It was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine-independant applications. B comes from BCPL.

  • PASCAL - 1970

    PASCAL was designed by Niklaus Wirth and published in 1970. It serves as a small, efficient language intended to encourage structured programming and data structuring. PASCAL is named in the honor of Blaise Pascal.

  • C - 1972

    C was originally designed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 - 1973 at Bell Labs. C is an imperative procedural computer language that is used for structured programming in things like operating systems. C has no acronym.

  • ML - 1973

    ML was designed by Robin Milner and others at the University of Edinburgh in 1973. ML provides pattern matching for function arguments and is used heavily in programming language research. ML is abbreviated Meta Language.

  • SQL - 1974

    Designed by: Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce
    Released in: 1974
    Purpose: Managing data in a relational database management system
    Acronym: Structured Query Language

  • ADA - 1980

    Jean Ichbiah (a French computer scientist) and his team from CII Honeywell Bull designed ADA under contract to the United States Department of Defense. The letters ADA are not an acronym, but a tribute to Augusta Ada Lovelace.

  • C++ - 1985

    In 1979, Bjarne Stroustrup, a Danish computer scientist, began to design C with classes. He would go on to rename it to C++, then release it 1985. C++'s purpose is mainly object-oriented system programming with efficiency and flexibility in its design.

  • Python - 1991

    Designed by: Guido van Rossum
    Released in: 1991
    Purpose: General-purpose programming language that has emphasized code readability and works on large and small scales
    Acronym: None

  • Visual Basic - 1991

    Developed by: Microsoft
    Released in: 1998
    Purpose: Third-generation event-driven programming language used for Microsoft's Component Object Model programming model.
    Acronym: None

  • Delphi - 1995

    Delphi was originally designed in 1995 by Borland as a rapid application development tool for Windows. Delphi's purpose nowadays is for developing desktop, mobile, app, and console applications. Delphi's full name is Embarcadero Delphi.

  • Javascript - 1995

    Netscape communications hired Brendan Eich to develop a programming language that could be easily used by programmers to design web pages on their web page markup. In December of 1995, Javascript was released. Javascript serves as a prototype-based interpreted programming language for the use of designing content and webpages on the World Wide Web. Javascript is not an acronym.

  • PHP - 1995

    Designed by: Rasmus Lerdorf
    Released in: 1995
    Purpose: Server-side scripting language used for web development
    Acronym: Personal Home Page or Hypertext preprocessor

  • Java - 1995

    James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton initiated the Java Program. Java was released in 1995. Java is a concurrent, class-based, object-oriented and can run on any platform that supports it. Java is most commonly used for client-server web applications. Java is derived from Java Coffee.