-
Plankalkul
Original Developers: Konrad Zuse.
Primary Purpose: Engineering purposes; first high-level language other than Von Neumann designed for a computer.
Name Significance: Acronym for "Plan Calculus". -
Fortran
Original Developers: John W. Backus of IBM.
Primary Purpose: Designed for numeric operations and scientific computations; popular in fields of high-performance computing.
Name Significance: Acronym for FORmula TRANslation; formerly known as FORTRAN. -
MATH-MATIC
Original Developers: A team led by Charles Katz and directed by Grace Hopper.
Primary Purpose: An early language for the UNIVAC.
Name Significance: N/A -
Lisp
Original Developers: John McCarthy at MIT.
Primary Purpose: Designed to be a practical mathematical notation for programs.
Name Significance: Acronym for LISt Processing. -
COBOL
Original Developers: Designed by CODASYL; based on previous work by Grace Hopper.
Primary Purpose: For creating applications in administrative, business, and finance systems/districts.
Name Significance: Acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language. -
RPG
Original Developers: IBM.
Primary Purpose: For business applications.
Name Significance: Acronym for Report Program Generator. -
BASIC
Original Developers: John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth.
Primary Purpose: To allow people without extensive knowledge of math and science to be able to use computers; designed for ease of use.
Name Significance: Acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. -
LOGO
Original Developers: Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon.
Primary Purpose: Mostly educational; designed to allow children to play with programming.
Name Significance: Originated from the Greek word "logos", which means word or thought. -
B
Original Developers: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
Primary Purpose: Designed for system development and not for any kind of numeric computations.
Name Significance: N/A -
PASCAL
Original Developers: Niklaus Wirth.
Primary Purpose: Typically used to teach structured programming and encourage good practices.
Name Significance: Named in honor of Blaise Pascal, a French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. -
C
Original Developers: Dennis Ritche of Bell Telephone Laboratories.
Primary Purpose: Developed for use on Unix; used for implementation of application and system software. It is one of the most used languages today.
Name Significance: Succeeded B. -
ML
Original Developers: Robert Milner (and others) at the University of Edinburgh.
Primary Purpose: Used extensively for the research of programming languages.
Name Significance: Acronym for Meta Language. -
SQL
Original Developers: Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce at IBM.
Primary Purpose: A database management language designed for use with relational databases.
Name Significance: Acronym for Structured Query Language. -
C++
Original Developers: Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs.
Primary Purpose: Developed to be an extension of C; includes features to support large-scale software development.
Name Significance: Signifies the language's origin and superiority to C. -
ADA
Original Developers: Team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull.
Primary Purpose: For developing extremely large software systems.
Name Significance: Named after Ada Lovelace, widely considered to be the first computer programmer. -
Delphi
Original Developers: Apple Computer team led by Larry Tesler; consulted with Niklaus Wirth.
Primary Purpose: An extension of Pascal. The programming language used by Delphi is known as Object Pascal.
Name Significance: N/A -
Python
Original Developers: Guido van Rossum.
Primary Purpose: To enable programmers to design code using fewer lines than usual, typically using a significant amount of whitespace.
Name Significance: N/A -
Visual Basic
Original Developers: Microsoft.
Primary Purpose: To serve as a user-friendly programming language for use by beginners.
Name Significance: Originated from BASIC, with added graphical components (hence the "Visual"). -
Java
Original Developers: James Gosling of Sun Microsystems.
Primary Purpose: To have the least amount of implementation dependencies possible; to be able to be written once and then used on any platform.
Name Significance: N/A -
Javascript
Original Developers: Brendan Eich of Netscape Communications.
Primary Purpose: Is one of the three core languages implements in the production of content for use on the World Wide Web.
Name Significance: N/A -
PHP
Original Developers: Rasmus Lerdorf.
Primary Purpose: To build dynamic, simple web apps.
Name Significance: Acronym for Personal Home Page.