Timeline
od ne ca
l Programming Languages
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e
1837
Considered the first ever true
programming language, the
analytical engine developed by
Charles Babbage had a profound
effect on all computing. Ada
Lovelace is credited with writing the
code, in her writings on the engine.
She went into both the operation,
semantics, and possible uses of the
device. Her writing is considered
specification manual for the engine,
so she is considered the first ever
computer programmer.
Wikipedia.org
Sources: Todd Verbeek
BYTE.com
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1950
Nearly as old as base 2
programming itself, assembly
language was developed as a way to
ease binary programming. Instead of
straight editing of memory locations
and base 2 numbers, assembly
language allows for the use of
specific 3 letter functions for the use
of operations, and variables to be
used in place of exact memory
locations. This made it much easier
to grasp the concepts of the code
(ones and zeros tend to fail to
convey the purpose of memory
locations). Even after 50 years,
assembly is still considered the most
efficient mid level language ever.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/programming_languages
http://microsoft.toddverbeek.com/lang.html
http://www.byte.com/art/9509/sec7/art19.htm
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1954
Fortran is the oldest high level
programming language still in use
today. Developed by IBM for
scientific and engineering
applications, Fortran came to
dominate this area of programming
early on and has been in continual
use in computationally intensive
areas such as climate modeling,
computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
and computational chemistry for half
a century.
ia.org/wiki/programming_languages
rosoft.toddverbeek.com/lang.html
w.byte.com/art/9509/sec7/art19.htm
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1956
Lisp is the second-oldest high-level
programming language in
widespread use today. Like Fortran,
Lisp has changed a great deal since
its early days. Lisp was originally
created as a practical mathematical
notation for computer programs. It
quickly became the favored
programming language for artificial
intelligence research. Lisp pioneered
many ideas in computer science,
including tree data structures,
automatic storage management,
dynamic typing, object-oriented
programming, and the self-hosting
compiler.
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1958 1959
ALGOL (short for ALGOrithmic COBOL's name is an acronym for
Language) was for 30 years the de COmmon Business-Oriented
facto standard for reporting Language. COBOL programs are in
algorithms in print. It was designed use globally in governmental and
to avoid some of the perceived military agencies, in commercial
problems with FORTRAN and enterprises, and on operating
eventually gave rise to many other systems. In the late 1990s, it was
programming languages (including estimated that of the 300 billion lines
Pascal). ALGOL uses bracketed of computer code that existed, eighty
statement blocks and was the first percent — or 240 billion lines —
language to use begin end pairs for were COBOL. It was also reported
delimiting them. There are three that more than half of all new
official main branches of ALGOL applications were still being created
family: ALGOL 58, ALGOL 60, and using COBOL — an estimated
ALGOL 68. Of these, ALGOL 60 was 5,000,000,000 net new lines of
the most widely known in the United COBOL code annually. COBOL is
States. ALGOL 60 also gave rise to also the reason for the Y2k scare,
several aspects of cpl, which was due to its widespread use and poor
then given to bcpl. error redundancy.
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Si
1962
Simula is considered one of the
earliest object-oriented programming
languages, although the object
model is often considered
incomplete. (Proponents of the
Smalltalk object model pinpoint some
important deficiencies of the Simula
concept of objects). As its name
implies, Simula was designed for
doing simulations, and the needs of
that domain provided the framework
for many of the features of object-
oriented languages today. Since
Simula type of objects are
reimplementation in C++, the
influence of Simula is often
understated.
C
I
AS
/I
PL
B
1964
PL/I ("Programming Language
One"), is an imperative computer
programming language designed for
scientific, engineering, and business
applications. It is undoubtedly one of
the most feature-rich programming
languages that has ever been
created and was one of the very first
in the highly-feature-rich category. It
has been used by various academic,
commercial and industrial users
since it was introduced in the early
1960s, and is still actively used
today.

IC
AS
B
1964
BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose
Symbolic Instruction Code) was
designed to provide access for non-
science students to computers. At
the time, nearly all computer use
required writing custom software,
which was something only scientists
and mathematicians tended to do.
The language (in one variant or
another) became widespread on
home microcomputers in the 1980s,
and remains popular to this day in a
handful of heavily evolved dialects.
was originally designed
al
sc
Pa
B
1969
B was created at Bell Labs by Ken
Thompson as an offshoot of BCPL.
Thompson stripped BCPL of
everything he felt he could do without
and added personal preferences to
the language (like reduction in white
space characters). B is today mostly
extinct, due to its leading to the
development of C.

al
sc
Pa
1971
Pascal is based on the ALGOL
programming language and named
in honor of mathematician and
philosopher Blaise Pascal. Initially,
Pascal was a language intended to
teach students structured
programming, and generations of
students have "cut their teeth" on
Pascal as an introductory language
in undergraduate courses.
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C
1972
Smalltalk is an object-oriented,
dynamically typed, reflective
programming language. It was
designed and created in part for
educational use, more so for
Constructivist teaching, at Xerox
PARC. It pioneered several features,
like true Object-Oriented
programming, just-in-time
compilation, and image-based
persistence.
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1972 1978
C is a general-purpose, procedural, SQL (Structured Query Language) is
imperative computer programming the most popular computer language
language developed in 1972 by used to create, modify, retrieve and
Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone manipulate data from relational
Laboratories for use with the Unix database management systems. The
operating system. It has since spread language has evolved beyond its
to many other operating systems, original purpose to support object-
and is now one of the most widely relational database management
used programming languages. C systems.
also has had a great influence on
many other popular languages,
especially C++, which was originally
designed as an enhancement to C. It
is the most commonly used
programming language for writing
system software, though it is also
widely used for writing applications.

a
Ad
1983
Ada is a structured, statically typed
imperative computer programming
language designed by a team under
contract by the US Navy during
1977–1983. It addresses many of the
same tasks as C or C++, but with
one of the best type-safety systems
available in a statically typed
programming language. Ada was
named after Ada Lovelace, who is
often credited with being the first
computer programmer.
++
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C
1983
Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup as
an improvement over the C
language, C++ is now used to write
almost all commercially available
software available today. Bjarne
Stroustrup wanted a language that
had the speed of BCPL, but features
of Simula. The result was a language
born from ALGOL 68, Ada, CLU, and
Metalanguage. C++ is a high-level
language with low-level calls,
allowing a broad range of
possibilities with its use. It also put
Object Oriented programming into
the mainstream of programming.

rl
Pe
1987
Perl is a general-purpose
programming language originally
developed for text manipulation and
now used for a wide range of tasks
including system administration, web
development, network programming,
GUI development, and more. The
language is intended to be practical
(easy to use, efficient, complete)
rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,
minimal). Its major features include
support for multiple programming
paradigms (procedural, object-
oriented, and functional styles),
automatic memory management,
built-in support for text processing,
and a large collection of third-party
modules.
on
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th
ub
Py
R
1991
Python has a fully dynamic type
system and uses automatic memory
management. Python is notable
amongst current popular high-level
languages for having a philosophy
that emphasizes the importance of
programmer effort over that of
computers and for rejecting more
arcane language features, readability
having a higher priority than speed or
expressiveness. Python is often
characterized as minimalist, though
this only applies to the core
language's syntax and semantics;
the standard library provides the
language with a large number of
additional libraries and extensions.
 y
ub
R
1993
Ruby is a reflective, object-oriented
programming language. It combines
syntax inspired by Perl with
Smalltalk-like object-oriented
features, and also shares some
features with Python, Lisp, Dylan and
CLU. Ruby is a single-pass
interpreted language. It was
designed by Yukihiro "Matz"
Matsumoto as a way to make a
language that had all the strengths of
other languages, and (attempt to
have) none of the weaknesses.
P
PH
Lu
1993
The Lua programming language is a
lightweight, reflective, imperative and
procedural language, designed as a
scripting language with extensible
semantics as a primary goal. Lua is
commonly described as a "multi-
paradigm" language, providing a
small set of general features that can
be extended to fit different problem
types, rather than providing a more
complex and rigid specification to
match a single paradigm. In general,
Lua strives to provide flexible meta-
features that can be extended as
needed, rather than supply a feature-
set specific to one programming
paradigm.

P
PH
1994
PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor)
is a reflective programming language
originally designed for producing
dynamic Web pages. PHP is used
mainly in server-side application
software, but can be used from a
command line interface or in
standalone graphical applications.
Originally developed to replace Perl
scripts being used to track the
number of page views, "Personal
Home Page" tools were released,
and has become today the largest
server side scripting language
available.
t
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va
va
Ja
Ja
1995
Java is a pure object oriented
language with a simpler model than
that of C++. Java is unique in that
instead of a compiler turning the
language into machine code, it is
instead turned into byte code that is
run on a virtual runtime available for
various operating systems. This
guarantees portability across all
available platforms, but at the cost of
efficiency. Java is the second most
popular Programming language
available in the world.
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1997
Javascript was developed by
Netscape Communications
Corporations, to coincide with their
adoption of Java support. It was
developed as a scripting language
for the web, and led to ECMAscript,
an official adoption by the W3C.
Today, javascript is a term to refer to
any ECMAscript implementation.