| Year |
Language |
Founder/ Invented by |
Claim to fame |
| 1954 |
Fortran |
IBM |
first high-level language with functional implementation |
| 1958 |
LISP |
MIT |
first homoiconic language |
| 1959 |
COBOL |
US DoD |
still in use |
| 1964 |
BASIC |
Darmouth College |
saw explosive growth with PCs in 1970s |
| 1972 |
C |
AT&T |
early systems language, foundation of UNIX |
| 1972 |
Prolog |
Alain Colmerauer |
first (and only?) "logic programming" language |
| 1978 |
SQL |
Oracle? |
first commercial language to use the relational model, still in use in most database systems |
| 1980 |
C++ |
AT&T Bell Labs |
major systems programming language |
| 1986 |
Objective C |
Apple Inc. |
main Apple language until the introduction of Swift |
| 1986 |
Erlang |
Ericsson |
originally written in Prolog, highly-available, hot-swapping, distributed language |
| 1987 |
Perl |
Larry Wall |
every sysadmin can write-only it |
| 1990 |
Haskell |
University of Glasgow |
first type classes implementation |
| 1991 |
Python |
Guido van Rossum |
ease of use and readability, built Dropbox |
| 1991 |
Visual Basic |
Microsoft |
|
| 1995 |
Ruby |
Yukihiro Matsumoto |
built GitHub |
| 1995 |
Javascript |
Netscape |
you're running it right now, most popular language on stackoverflow |
| 1995 |
Java |
Sun |
"write once, run everywhere", consistently the most popular language on the TIOBE index |
| 1995 |
PHP |
Rasmus Lerdorf |
personal project, built Facebook, which eventually replaced it with Hack (2014) |
| 2001 |
C# |
Microsoft |
multi-paradigm |
| 2009 |
Go |
Google |
readable, concurrent, high-performance |
| 2010 |
Rust |
Mozilla |
memory-safe, concurrent, high-performance
|
| 2011 |
Kotlin |
Jet Brains |
|
| 2012 |
Swift |
Apple |
|
| 2014 |
Type Script |
Microsoft |
Led by Anders Hejlsberg |
