Home Home  Article Index Article Index  
GuruPedia  

Timeline of programming languages

This is a chronological list of programming languages.

See also Alphabetical list, Categorical list, and Generational list; Programming language, Computing timeline, and History of computing hardware.

Table of contents

Pre 1950

                  * ~1840  FIRST PROGRAM--Ada Lovelace
                  *  1945  Plankalkül -- Konrad Zuse

1950s

                  *  1952  A-0 -- Grace Hopper
                  *  1954  Mark I Autocode -- Tony Brooker
                A-0 ~1954  FORTRAN (First program September 20th 1954) -- John W. Backus
                A-0  1954  ARITH-MATIC -- Grace Hopper
                A-0  1954  MATH-MATIC -- Grace Hopper
                A-0  1955  FLOW-MATIC -- Grace Hopper
                  *  1956  Information Processing Language (IPL) -- Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, Herbert Simon
         FLOW-MATIC  1957  COMTRAN -- Bob Bemer
            FORTRAN  1958  FORTRAN II -- John W. Backus
            FORTRAN  1958  Algol 58 -- ??
                IPL  1959  LISP -- John McCarthy

1960s

 FLOW-MATIC COMTRAN  1960  COBOL -- The Codasyl Committee
              ALGOL  1960  Algol 60
              ALGOL  1960  JOSS
         FORTRAN II  1962  FORTRAN IV
                  *  1962  APL -- Iverson
            ALGOL58  1962  MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder) -- Arden, et. al.
            ALGOL60  1962  Simula
         FORTRAN II  1962  SNOBOL -- Griswold, et al.
            ALGOL60  1963  CPL -- Barron, Strachey, et al.
             SNOBOL  1962  SNOBOL3 -- Griswold, et al.
           CPL LISP  1964  COWSEL -- Burstall, Popplestone
            ALGOL60  1964  PL/I -- IBM
   FORTRAN II, JOSS  1964  BASIC -- Kemeny and Kurtz
                     1964  TRAC -- Mooers (work started in 1959)
         FORTRAN II  1966  FORTRAN IV
               LISP  1966  ISWIM -- Landin
            ALGOL60  1966  CORAL66 Real Time version of Algol 60
                CPL  1967  BCPL -- Richards
       Fortran LISP  1967  MUMPS -- Massachusetts General Hospital
             Simula  1967  Simula67
            SNOBOL3  1967  SNOBOL4 -- Griswold, et al.
            Algol60  1968  ALGOL 68 -- Wijngaarten, et al.
             COWSEL  1968  POP-1 -- Burstall,  Popplestone
                     1968  Forth -- Moore (first paper, 1970) 
               Lisp  1968  Logo -- Papert

1970s

              POP-1  1970  POP-2 
            ALGOL60  1971  Pascal -- Wirth, Jensen
           Simula67  1972  Smalltalk Environment -- Digitalk
             B BCPL  1972  C -- Ritchie
                  *  1972  INTERCAL
                  *  1972  PROLOG -- Colmerauer 
       Pascal BASIC  1973  COMAL -- Christensen, Løfstedt
              BASIC  1974  GRASS -- DeFanti
               LISP  1975  Scheme -- Sussman, Steele
              BASIC  1975  Altair BASIC -- Gates, Allen
          C FORTRAN  1976  RATFOR -- Kernighan
              MUMPS  1977  X11.1 ANSI Standard MUMPS
         FORTRAN IV  1978  FORTRAN77
                  *  1978  VISICALC -- Bricklin, Frankston)
                     1979  REXX -- Cowlishaw 20 March
           C SNOBOL  1979  Awk -- Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan
                  *  1979  VULCAN DBASE-II -- Ratliff )
            Algol68  1979  Green -- Ichbiah et al., US Dept of Defense

1980s

         C Simula67  1980  "C with Classes" -- Stroustrup
           Simula67  1980  Smalltalk-80 -- Digitalk
              Green  1983  Ada -- US Dept of Defense
     C with Classes  1983  C++ -- Stroustrup
             Pascal  1983  Turbo Pascal -- Hejlsberg
              BASIC  1983  True BASIC -- Kemeny and Kurtz
                 *   1984  Standard ML (Standard Meta-Language)
             dBase   1984  CLIPPER -- Nantucket
          1977MUMPS  1985  1984 MUMPS
             dBase   1985  PARADOX -- Borland 
         Interpress  1985  PostScript -- Warnock
              BASIC  1985  QuickBASIC -- Microsoft
                     1986  LabVIEW -- National Instruments 
           Simula67  1986  Eiffel -- Meyer
                 *   1987  HyperTalk -- Apple 
                 *   1987  SQL-1 
                Awk  1987  Perl -- Wall
             MATLAB  1988  Octave
          dBase-III  1988  dBaseIV
           Awk Lisp  1988  Tcl -- Ousterhout
               REXX  1988  Object REXX -- Simon Nash
       Turbo-Pascal  1989  Turbo-Pascal+OOP -- Borland
                  C  1989  Standard C -- ANSI X3.159-1989 (adopted by ISO in 1990)
   Pascal Modula-II  1989  OBERON -- Wirth

1990s

                     1990  Haskell
          1984MUMPS  1990  1990 MUMPS
                     1991  Python -- Van Rossum
                     1991  Q
         QuickBASIC  1991  Visual Basic -- Alan Cooper, Microsoft
              SQL-1  1992  SQL-2 
   Turbo-Pascal OOP  1992  Borland Pascal
              Forth  1993  FALSE -- Oortmerrsen
              FALSE  1993  Brainfuck -- Mueller
          HyperTalk  1993  Revolution
          HyperCard  1993  AppleScript -- Apple
     Perl Smalltalk  1993  Ruby
                     1993  Lua
             Ada 83  1995  Ada 95 -- ISO
     Borland Pascal  1995  Delphi(1) -- Borland
                     1995  Java -- Sun Microsystems
          1990MUMPS  1995  1995 MUMPS 
               REXX  1996  NetRexx -- Cowlishaw                  
     Standard ML,84  1997  SML'97  
              PHP 3  1997  PHP
             Scheme  1997  Pico -- Free University of Brussels
                C++  1998  C++98 -- ANSI/ISO Standard C++
                     1998  Erlang programming language -- Open Source Erlang -- from Ericsson

2000s

                     2000  Joy -- von Thun
              C C++  2000  D -- Walter Bright, Digital Mars
     C C++ COM Java  2000  C# -- Microsoft
          DELPHI(5)  2001  KYLIX -- Borland
         Whitespace  2003  Whitespace -- Brady and Morris
           Perl C++  2003  S2
  C# ML MetaHaskell  2003  Nemerle -- University of Wroclaw

Programming languages with unknown or questionable dates

                     19??  TUTOR -- Tenczar (for Plato)
                  *  197?  sh (Bourne Shell) -- Bourne
                 sh  19??  ksh (Korn Shell) -- Korn
                     1960s? IITRAN
                ksh  199?  zsh (Z Shell)
                  *  1990  Self -- Sun Microsystems Inc.
          Self Java  199?  LiveScript -- Brendan Eich, Netscape (Self inspired, made for Java interactions)
         LiveScript  1995  JavaScript -- Netscape
         JavaScript  1997  ECMAScript -- ECMA TC39-TG1
                     2003  Rikstation

Legend

     Predecessor(s)  YEAR  PRODUCT -- developer, Company
     (  Entry  ) means not a universal programming language
     * <YEAR>    means no direct predecessor / unique language
Popular Topics

This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.  For the live article, click here.

Privacy