Programming Computers

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.

1958 ALGOL and LISP

An algorithmic language created by American and European scientists, ALGOL became the point of origin for world-renowned programming languages such as Pascal, Java, C, and C++.

In the same year, John McCarthy invented the List Processor or LISP. Intended for AI, companies like Boeing and Genworks are still using it.

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.

1970 PASCAL

Niklaus Wirth developed PASCAL and named it after Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician. So easy to learn, it was used by Apple early on in its history.

1972 Smalltalk, C, and SQL

Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, and Dan Ingalls developed Smalltalk at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre. It was designed to modify code. Its principles are present in today's Java, Python, and Ruby and are used by companies like CrowdStrike and Logitech.

C was also developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. It was designed to be used with the Unix operating system. Based on its forerunner B, languages like C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, and Python are all derived from C.

In what could be called a vintage year for coding and programming languages, Raymond Boyce and Donald Chamberlain developed SQL (Structured Query Language) the same year. It was first called SEQUEL, and it was used for viewing and altering information in databases.

These three languages represent a significant leap forward in programming, which has impacted some of the largest tech companies in existence today. Our whole way of using the digital world, from social media to how a business's lead referral program functions, owes a debt to these developments.

1980s ADA

Named after Ada Lovelace, the computing pioneer, ADA was designed by Jean Ichbiah's team at CUU Honeywell Bull. Ada is a high-level programming language, extended from other popular programming languages such as Pascal. ADA is used for air-traffic control in various European countries and space programs.

1983 C++, Objective C

Bjarne Stroustrup modified the C language at Bell Labs. The result was C++, which had some augmentations such as classes and other OOP features, templates, etc. C++ is now used in MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, and various types of high-performance software.

Brad Cox and Tom Love then developed Objective-C, the programming language used for Apple's operating systems.

1987 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 and Visual Basic

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.

Visual Basic allows a user to drag and drop sections of code via a user interface (GUI). Parts of Visual Basic are used in applications like Word and Excel.

1993 Ruby

Yukihiro Matsumoto created Ruby as a high-level programming language. Used for web applications development, today it's used by Groupon.

1995 Java, JavaScript, PHP

Created by James Gosling in 1995, Java is one of the world's most famous and popular programming languages. It's a general-purpose, high-level language used in cell phones and parking machines.

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.

PHP was known as Personal Home Page but now stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. It was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf. It's used for building and maintaining web pages and server-side development. Huge companies like Facebook, Wikipedia, and WordPress use PHP.

Application Programming Interface (API)

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of rules and protocols that enable different software applications to communicate and interact with each other. It serves as a bridge between systems, allowing them to exchange data or functionality without needing to understand the details of each other's implementation.

Some well known API's are:

• RESTful
• SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a protocol for exchanging structured information in the implementation of web services. It uses XML as its message format and relies on application layer protocols like HTTP or SMTP for message negotiation and transmission. SOAP is designed to enable communication between applications running on different operating systems, with different technologies, and written in different programming languages.

Other Programming Languages