| General-purpose languages | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language | Name | ca | Inventor | HW! |
| FORTRAN | Formula Translator | ‘57 | J. Backus at IBM | x |
| LISP | List Processing | ‘58 | J. McCarthy at MIT | x |
| COBOL | Common Business Oriented Language | ‘60 | CODASYL Committee | x |
| BASIC | Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code | ‘63 | J. G. Kemeny & T. E. Kurtz at Dartmouth U. | x |
| Pascal | for Blaise Pascal | ‘70 | N. Wirth | x |
| C | a language named B came first | ‘72 | D. Ritchie at Bell Labs | x |
| Modula | Modular Language | ‘77 | N. Wirth | x |
| Ada | for Ada Lovelace | ‘79 | J. Ichbiah’s team at Honeywell for DOD | x |
| C++ | an Orwellian increment of C | ‘86 | B. Stroustrup | x |
| Perl | Practical Extraction and Report Language | ‘87 | L. Wall | x |
| Oberon | after the moon Oberon of Uranus | ‘88 | N. Wirth | x |
| Python | for Monty Python’s Flying Circus | ‘91 | G. van Rossum | x |
| Java | named by marketing committee? | ‘91 | Sun | x |
| Ruby | play on Perl | ‘95 | Y. Matsumoto | |
| C# | play on C++ | ‘00 | Microsoft | |
| Special-purpose languages | ||||
| sh, csh, ksh, bash | Unix shells | ‘70s | various | x |
| SQL | Structured Query Language | ‘70s | IBM | |
| PostScript | ‘82 | Adobe | x | |
| TCL/TK | Tool Command Language | ‘90 | J. Ousterhout at UCB | |
| AppleScript | ‘93 | Apple | ||
| JavaScript | was “LiveScript”, renamed upon alliance with Sun | ‘95 | B.Eich for Netscape | x |
| PHP | PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor | ‘95 | R. Lerdorf | x |
See also:
Formerly hosted at Uni Freiburg: The Language List - Version 2.4, January 23, 1995. (Another victim of an idiotic content management systems.)
Pixel’s Language history diagram