-
Plankalkul
Konrad Zuse; designed for engineering purposes; it is German for “Plan Calculus” -
Fortran
John Backus; the name derived from ‘Formula Translation’ and has been made to do jobs such as numerical weather prediction, computational psychics, and chemistry. -
MATH- MATIC
Remington Rand; it was an early programming language for things like UNIVAC 1 and UNIVAC 2; named after its ability to strive in areas of mathematics -
Lisp
John McCarthy; it was developed as a mathematical notation for computer programs; the name comes from Lisp processor. -
COBOL
designed by Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney and Jean E. Sammet. It is an acronym for Common Business Oriented Language and was created as the DoD need for a portable programming language for data processing. -
RPG
IBM is the developer; made for business applications; stands for Report Program Generator -
BASIC
John George Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. It is an acronym for Beginner’s All Symbolic Instruction Code and they wanted to enable students in fields (other than math and science) to use computers. -
LOGO
Daniel Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon; first created to teach concepts of programming related to Lisp; The name derives from the Greek logos meaning word or "thought" by Feurzeig -
B
Developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Its name is a contraction of BCPL. It was designed for machine independent application such as system and language software. -
PASCAL
Created by Niklaus Wirth; intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring; named in honor of mathematician Blaise Pascal -
C
Denis Richie, used to re-implement the Unix operating system; developers originally wanted to call it B for the programming language but chose C after B lacked the ability to take advantage of some of the PDP-11’s features -
ML
Robin Milner and others at the University of Edinburgh; conceived to develop proof tactics in the LCF- theorem prover; ML stands for Meta Language -
SQL
Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce; designed for managing data held in a RDBMS or for stream processing in a RDSMS; stands for Structured Query Language -
ADA
Designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah, to supersede over 450 programming languages used by the DoD at that time; named after Ada Lovelace, who is said to be the first computer programmer -
C++
Bjarne Stroustrup, designed for system programming and large systems with performance, efficiency and flexibility of use as its highlights; means C with Classes before being shortened to C++ -
Python
Guido van Rossum; emphasizes code readability and its syntax lets programmers express concepts in fewer lines of code; Rossum chose Python as a working title and he was a fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus -
Visual Basic
Microsoft; Microsoft made it to be relatively easy to learn and use and derived it from BASIC; it has given programmers the ability to create an application provided by the program itself; derives from BASIC but has more VISUAL components -
Delphi
Borland and Embarcadero Technologies; Danny Thorpe made the name Delphi in reference to the Oracle of Delphi. They wanted to provide database connectivity to programmers. -
Java
James Gosling; specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It was also intended for developers to only have to write once and run anywhere. (Java can run on all applications that support it.) The name comes from Java coffee after being changed from Oak. -
PHP
Rasmus Lerdorf; designed for web development and used as a general purpose programming language; it stand for Personal Home Page