1843 ADA

LOVELACE

Lovelace made the leap that

numbers could represent
other things, and the idea of
programming languages
was born. Lovelace’s
groundbreaking work was
the first step in being able
to design a language
capable of giving computers
instructions.
 1957
FORTRAN

John Backus created

Formula Translation or
FORTRAN back in 1957.
Incredibly, this programming
language from the 1950s is
still used today in
supercomputers and
scientific and mathematical
computations.
 1959
COBOL
COBOL was developed by
a team led by Dr. Grace
Murray Hopper; COBOL
stands for Common
Business Oriented
Language. It was designed
for credit card transaction
processors, traffic signals,
and phone calls, and today
is used in banking and
gaming. Today’s virtual
PBX system and other
modern solutions to
communication rest on the
shoulders of programming
languages like COBOL.
 1964
BASIC

Students developed BASIC

at Dartmouth College. It
stands for Beginners All-
Purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code. BASIC was
then further developed and
marketed as a product by
Bill Gates.
 1970
PASCAL

Niklaus Wirth developed this

programming language and
named it after Blaise Pascal,
the French mathematician.
So easy to learn, it was used
by Apple early on in its
history.
 1983
C++
Bjarne Stroustrup modified
the C language at Bell Labs.
The result was C++, which
had some augmentations
such as classes, templates,
and virtual functions. C++ is
now used in MS Office,
Adobe Photoshop, and
various types of high-
performance software.
 1887
PERL

Larry Wall developed PERL

as a general-purpose, high-
level language. He designed
it for text editing, but today
its primary use is in
database applications, data
processing, graphic
programming, and system
administration.
 1990
HASKELL
Named after the American
mathematician Haskell
Brooks Curry. Haskell is a
primarily mathematical
programming language.
Used in various industries
that need to make
complicated calculations,
crunch numbers, and keep
records.
 1991
PYTHON
The iconic British comedy
act Monty Python inspired
Python’s name. Guido Van
Rossum developed this
general-purpose, high-level
language. Today Python is
one of the most popular
programming languages
worldwide. Giants like
Google and Spotify use it.
 1993
RUBY
Yukihiro Matsumoto created
Ruby as a high-level
programming language.
Used for web applications
development, today it’s used
by Groupon.
 1995
JavaScript

JavaScript was created by

Brendan Eich. Used for web
development, PDF
documents, and desktop
widgets, it’s on almost every
major website. Some
famous examples are
Adobe, Gmail, and Mozilla
Firefox.
 2000
C#

Microsoft developed C# in
an attempt to combine
elements of Visual Basic and
C. It’s now used in all the
company’s products.
 2003
SCALA

In 2003 Martin Odersky

created Scala. Its ability to
work with Java gives it an
advantage over Android
development. Scala is used
by social media and
entertainment giants like
Twitter, Linkedin, Twitter,
and Netflix.
 2009
GO (GOOGLE)
Large software systems face
various challenges, and
Google developed Go to
resolve them.
Go is popular with big tech
companies, such as Uber,
Dropbox, and of course,
Google. If you need to find
out what is vishing? In part,
you can thank Go for finding
the answer.
 2014
SWIFT
Apple developed Swift to
replace C, C++, and
Objective-C. The idea was
that Swift would be easier
and more versatile than
these languages. Swift can
be used for cloud
applications, mobile, and
desktop. Language platform
Duolingo used it recently to
launch a new app. Making
apps that customers love
using isn’t easy; these days,
many companies use
a Mobile App Flowchart.