FORTRAN
The first widely used high-level programming language, created at IBM for the IBM 704 and released in 1957.
Languages
The programming languages that mattered - each tied to its original report or specification.
48 entries, all primary-sourced
COBOL
A business-oriented programming language defined by the CODASYL committee in 1959-60 and published as COBOL-60.
ALGOL 60
The influential 1960 algorithmic language whose report introduced block structure, lexical scope, and a formal grammar notation that shaped nearly every later language.
LISP
The language of symbolic expressions designed by John McCarthy, one of the oldest high-level languages still in use and the source of many ideas now taken for granted.
BASIC
BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was created at Dartmouth in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz as an easy first language; with its line numbers and GOTO it became the lingua franca of the home-computer era.
BCPL
Martin Richards's typeless systems programming language from the late 1960s, the ancestor of B and therefore of C.
Simula
The Norwegian language that introduced classes and objects, making Simula 67 the first object-oriented programming language.
B
Ken Thompson's stripped-down version of BCPL at Bell Labs around 1969, the direct predecessor of the C language.
Assembly Language
A human-readable notation of short mnemonics that map essentially one-to-one onto a CPU's machine instructions, sitting just above raw binary and assembled directly into machine code.
Pascal
The teaching language designed by Niklaus Wirth around 1970, built to encourage structured programming and clear, disciplined code.
C
The systems programming language created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs around 1972, used to write Unix and a large share of software since.
Smalltalk
Alan Kay's group at Xerox PARC built Smalltalk, a pure object-oriented language based on message passing that also shaped the modern graphical user interface.
ML
A statically-typed functional language with type inference, pattern matching, and algebraic data types, created by Robin Milner as the metalanguage of the LCF proof system and the ancestor of Standard ML, OCaml, F#, and Haskell.
SQL
The declarative language for defining and querying relational databases, born as SEQUEL at IBM in 1974 and the most widely used database language for fifty years.
Scheme
A small, elegant dialect of LISP with lexical scope, first-class functions, and proper tail calls, widely used in teaching and language research.
Ada
The US Department of Defense's large, safety-focused language, named for Ada Lovelace and standardized in 1983 as ANSI/MIL-STD-1815A.
C++
An extension of C that added classes and object-oriented features, starting as 'C with Classes' in 1979 and first released commercially in 1985.
Erlang
Ericsson's concurrent functional language, built for massively concurrent, fault-tolerant telecom systems through lightweight processes and message passing.
Objective-C
A C-based, Smalltalk-influenced object-oriented language that became the primary language for NeXT, macOS, and iOS development before Swift.
Perl
Larry Wall's 1987 text-processing language that became the dominant early CGI and web-scripting tool, nicknamed the duct tape of the Internet.
Tcl
John Ousterhout's 1988 embeddable command language, paired with the Tk GUI toolkit, built on the idea that everything is a string.
Haskell
A purely functional, non-strict, statically typed language designed by committee as a common standard for lazy functional programming research.
HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
The SGML-derived markup language that structures every web page, from Tim Berners-Lee's first tag set to the modern HTML5 standard.
Visual Basic
Microsoft's event-driven language that let developers build Windows applications by dragging controls onto forms, first released in 1991.
Python
A readable, batteries-included programming language begun in 1989 and first released publicly in 1991, now dominant in scripting, data work, and AI.
Brainfuck
Urban Muller's 1993 esoteric language with just eight single-character instructions, designed so its compiler could fit in a few hundred bytes, yet powerful enough to be Turing complete.
Lua
The lightweight embeddable scripting language created at PUC-Rio in 1993, built around tables and coroutines and widely embedded in games, Redis, and nginx.
Ruby
Yukihiro Matsumoto's object-oriented scripting language, first released publicly in 1995 and designed around programmer happiness, which later became the foundation of Ruby on Rails.
Java
Sun Microsystems' object-oriented, portable programming language, released in 1995, that compiles to bytecode and runs on the Java Virtual Machine under the promise of 'write once, run anywhere.'
PHP
The server-side scripting language created by Rasmus Lerdorf that powered much of the dynamic web, including WordPress and early Facebook.
JavaScript
The scripting language of the web browser, created at Netscape in 1995 and later standardized as ECMAScript.
OCaml
An industrial-strength dialect of ML developed at INRIA, combining strong type inference and pattern matching with an object system and a fast native-code compiler.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
The web's styling language, which separates a page's presentation -- color, layout, fonts -- from its underlying HTML structure.
D
Walter Bright's systems programming language, begun around 2001, that reworks C++ with a cleaner design and optional garbage collection while still compiling to native machine code.
C#
Microsoft's object-oriented language, designed by Anders Hejlsberg and first shipped with the .NET platform in early 2002 as a modern, type-safe alternative to Java and C++.
Scala
Martin Odersky's language that fuses object-oriented and functional programming in a statically typed language on the JVM, and an influential source of features later adopted elsewhere.
F#
A functional-first programming language for .NET, created at Microsoft Research and descended from OCaml, bringing type inference, pattern matching, and immutability to the .NET ecosystem.
Clojure
A modern Lisp for the Java Virtual Machine, created by Rich Hickey, built around immutable persistent data structures and a principled approach to managing state for concurrent programming.
Nim
An efficient, statically typed compiled language with Python-like syntax, started around 2008 under the name Nimrod, that compiles to C, C++, or JavaScript.
Go
Google's statically typed, garbage-collected language, released in 2009, built for simple syntax, fast compilation, and built-in concurrency via goroutines and channels.
Racket
A descendant of Scheme, formerly named PLT Scheme, designed as a platform for language-oriented programming - building new programming languages as easily as libraries - and widely used in research and education.
Kotlin
JetBrains's statically typed JVM language, publicly unveiled in 2011 and built for concise, null-safe code; Google made it a first-class Android language in 2017.
Dart
Google's client-optimized programming language, first unveiled in 2011, that powers the Flutter framework and supports both JIT and AOT compilation along with sound null safety.
Elixir
Jose Valim's functional language on the Erlang VM, pairing Erlang's concurrency and fault tolerance with friendly, expressive syntax and strong metaprogramming.
TypeScript
Microsoft's typed superset of JavaScript, created by Anders Hejlsberg and first released in 2012, which adds optional static types that compile to plain JavaScript.
Swift
Apple's modern, safety-focused programming language for iOS and macOS development, introduced in 2014 and open-sourced in 2015.
Rust
A systems programming language (1.0 in 2015) that guarantees memory safety without a garbage collector through its ownership and borrowing model.
Zig
Andrew Kelley's modern systems language, first introduced in 2016, that aims to be a simpler and safer alternative to C with no hidden control flow, strong C interoperability, and first-class cross-compilation.