01800:
Joseph Marie Jacquard teaches a loom to read punch cards, creating the first heavily multi-threaded processing unit. His invention was fiercely opposed by the silk-weavers who expected the birth of Skynet.
1842:
Ada Lovelace gets bored of being noble and scribbles in a notebook what will later be known as the first published computer program, only slightly inconvenienced by the fact that there were no computers around at the time.
1936:
Alan Turing invents everything, the British courts do not approve and have him chemically castrated.
The Queen later pardoned him, but unfortunately he had already been dead for centuries at that time.
1936:
Alonzo Church also invents everything with Turing, but from across the pond and was not castrated by the Queen.
1954:
John Backus creates FORTRAN which is the first language that real programmers use.
1957:
Grace Hopper invents the first enterprise ready business oriented programming language and calls it the “common business-oriented language” or COBOL for short.
1958:
ALGOL (short for Algorithmic Language) was developed jointly by a committee of European and American computer scientists in 1958. ALGOL introduced code blocks and the begin…end pairs for delimiting them. It was also the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope. Moreover, it was the first programming language which gave detailed attention to formal language definition.
1958:
Lisp was invented by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Lisp is an expression oriented language. Unlike most other languages, no distinction is made between "expressions" and "statements"; all code and data are written as expressions. When an expression is evaluated, it produces a value (in Common Lisp, possibly multiple values), which can then be embedded into other expressions. Each value can be any data type. Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, the self-hosting compiler, and the read–eval–print loop. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research.
Around 1958:
COMIT was the first string processing language developed on the IBM 700/7000 series computers by Dr. Victor Yngve and collaborators at MIT from 1957 to 1965. Yngve created the language for supporting computerized research in the field of linguistics, and more specifically, the area of machine translation for natural language processing.
1960:
APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It is still used today for certain applications.
1960:
ALGOL 60 (short for Algorithmic Language 1960) is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages developed by Edsger W. Dijkstra and Jaap A. Zonneveld. ALGOL 60 was the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope.
1962:
SNOBOL (StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language) is a series of computer programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4. It was one of a number of text-string-oriented languages. SNOBOL4 stands apart from most programming languages of its era by having patterns as a first-class data type (i.e. a data type whose values can be manipulated in all ways permitted to any other data type in the programming language) and by providing operators for pattern concatenation and alternation.
1964:
PL/I (Programming Language One) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming uses. It has been used by various academic, commercial and industrial organizations since it was introduced in the 1960s, and continues to be actively used.
1964:
Simula is the name of two simulation programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Syntactically, it is a fairly faithful superset of ALGOL 60. Simula is considered the first object-oriented programming language. As its name suggests, Simula was designed for doing simulations. Simula 67 introduced objects, classes, inheritance and subclasses, virtual procedures, coroutines, and discrete event simulation, and features garbage collection. Also other forms of subtyping (besides inheriting subclasses) were introduced in Simula derivatives.
1964: Basic
In 1964, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) language at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, United States. They wanted to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. Having an easy-to-learn language on these early personal computers allowed small business owners, professionals, hobbyists, and consultants to develop custom software on computers they could afford.
1964: TRAC
TRAC (for Text Reckoning And Compiling) Language is a programming language developed between 1959-1964 by Calvin Mooers and implemented on a PDP-10 in 1964 by L. Peter Deutsch. TRAC is a purely text-based language—a kind of macro language. Unlike traditional ad hoc macro languages of the time, such as those found in assemblers, TRAC is well planned, consistent, and in many senses complete. It has explicit input and output operators. TRAC is, like APL or LISP, an expression oriented language.
Around 1965: CPL
Around 1966: Algol W
1967: BCPL
1968: Logo
1969: B
1969:
Alan Kay invents object oriented programming and calls it Smalltalk, in Smalltalk everything is an object, even an object is an object. No one really has time to understand the meaning of small talk.
1970: Forth
1970: Pascal
1970: Icon
1970: Algol 68
1970:
Niklaus Wirth makes Pascal become a thing along with a number of other languages, he likes making languages. He also invents Wirth’s law which makes Moore’s law obsolete because software developers will write so bloated software that even mainframes cannot keep up. This will later be proven to be true with the invention of Electron.js.
1971:
Dennis Ritchie got bored during work hours at Bell Labs so he decided to make C which had curly braces so it ended up being a huge success. Afterwards he added segmentation faults and other developer friendly features to aid productivity.
Still having a couple of hours remaining he and his buddies at Bell Labs decided to make an example program demonstrating C, they make a operating system called Unix.
1972: PL/M
1974: Clu
1975: Modula
1975: Scheme
1978: awk
1978: csh
Around 1978: InterPress
1978: JaM
1979: Rex
1979: Ada
1980: C with Classes
1981: ABC
1982: ksh
1983: Turbo Pascal
1983: Objective-C
1983: C++
1983: ML
1984: PostScript
1984: Neon
1984: Concurrent C
1984: Common Lisp
1985: Object Pascal
1986: Eiffel
1987: Oberon
1987: Caml
1987:
Larry Wall has a religious experience, becomes a preacher and makes Perl the doctrine.
1983:
Jean Ichbiah notices that Ada Lovelace programs never actually ran and decided to create a language with her name but the language continues to be not run.
1986:
Brac Box and Tol Move decide to make an unreadable version of C based on Smalltalk which they call Objective-C but no one is able to understand the syntax.
1983:
Bjarne Stroustrup travels back to the future and notices that C is not taking enough time to compile, he adds every feature he can think of to the language and names it C++.
Programmers everywhere adopt it so they have genuine excuses to watch cat videos and read xkcd while working.
1988: Tcl
1988: Modula 3
1989: Yerk
1989: Clos
1989: bash
1991: NetRexx
1991: Java
1991: Sather
Around 1991: Visual Basic
1991:
Guido van Rossum does not like culy braces and invents Python, syntax choices were inspired by Monty Python and the Flying Circus.
Around 1993: Mops
1993:
Roberto Ierusalimschy and friends decide they need a scripting language local to Brazil, during localization an error was made that made indices start counting from 1 instead of 0, they named it Lua.
1993:
Yukihiro Matsumoto is not very happy, he notices other programmers are not happy. He creates Ruby to make programmers happy. After creating Ruby “Matz” is happy, the Ruby community is happy, everyone is happy.
1994:
Rasmus Lerdorf makes a template engine for his personal homepage CGI scripts, he releases his dotfiles on the web.
The world decides to use these dotfiles for everything and in a frenzy Rasmus throws some extra database bindings in there for the heck of it and calls it PHP.
1995: Delphi
1995: PHP
1995:
Brendan Eich takes the weekend off to design a language that will be used to power every single web browser in the world power and eventually Skynet . He originally went to Netscape and said it was called LiveScript but Java became popular during the code review so they decided they better use curly braces and rename it to JavaScript.
Java turned out to be a trademark that would get them in trouble, JavaScript later gets renamed to ECMAScript and everyone still calls it JavaScript.
1996: J
1996: Objective Caml
1996:
James Gosling invents Java, the first truly overly verbose object oriented programming language where design patterns rule supreme over pragmatism.
Its super effective, the manager provider container provider service manager singleton manager provider pattern is born.
2000:
Anders Hejlsberg re-invents Java and calls it C# because programming in C feels cooler than Java. Everyone loves this new version of Java for totally not being like Java.
2000: Internet C++
2005:
David Hanselmeyer Hansen creates a web framework called Ruby on Rails, people no longer remember that the two are separate things.
2006:
John Resig writes a helper library for JavaScript, everyone thinks it’s a language and make careers of copy and pasting jQuery codes from the internets.
2009:
Ken Thompson and Rob Pike decide to make a language like C, but with more safety equipment and more marketable and with Gophers as mascots.
They call it Go, make it open source and sell Gopher branded kneepads and helmets separately.
2010:
Graydon Hoare also wants to make a language like C, he calls it Rust. Everyone demands that every single piece of software be rewritten in Rust immediately. Graydon wants shinier things and starts working on Swift for Apple.
2012:
Anders Hjelsberg wants to write C# in web browsers, he designs TypeScript which is JavaScript but with more Java in it.
2013:
Jeremy Ashkenas wants to be happy like Ruby developers so he creates CoffeeScript which compiles to be JavaScript but looks more like Ruby. Jeremy never became truly happy like Matz and Ruby developers.
2014:
Chris Lattner makes Swift with the primary design goal of not being Objective-C, in the end it looks like Java.
2016:
2016: Ring
