Edy Dawson-Yoro
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Programming

Software development has come a long way since the 1940s. Below is a small sampling of the many programming languages developed in the last few decades:

  1. 1943-6 - ENIAC coding system: John Von Neumann, John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, Herman Goldstine after Alan Turing
  2. 1954-1955 - FORTRAN: Team led by John W. Backus at IBM. A more efficient alternative to assembly language.
  3. 1956-1958 - LISP: John McCarthy. Pioneered many ideas in tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, object-oriented programming, and the self-hosting compiler.
  4. 1959 - COBOL: The Codasyl Committee. COBOL is the most widely used programming language in the world.
  5. 1964 - BASIC: Kemeny and Kurtz. There are more dialects of BASIC than there are of any other programming language.
  6. 1971 - PASCAL: Wirth, Jensen. Pascal was developed with the intention of teaching students structured programming.
  7. 1972 - C: Ritchie. One of the most widely used languages in the world.
  8. 1983 - C++: Stroustrup. C++ has been one of the most popular commercial programming languages since the 1990s.
  9. 1985 - Postscript: Warnock, founder of Adobe. Postscript is a page description language which sparked the desktop publishing revolution in the 1980s.
  10. 1987 - Perl: Wall. One of "the three Ps" (Perl, Python, and PHP) - the most popular server-side, open source scripting languages for the Web.
  11. 1991 - Python: Van Rossum. A multi-paradigm language, Python supports object orientation, structured, functional, and aspect-oriented programming styles.
  12. 1991 - Visual Basic: Alan Cooper at Microsoft. VB enables rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using DAO, RDO, or ADO, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects.
  13. 1993 - Ruby: Yukihiro Matsumoto. A multi-paradigm programming language Ruby supports procedural, object oriented, functional programming styles.
  14. 1995 - Java: James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. Achieves platform independence by using a Java virtual machine on the host computer.
  15. 1997 - PHP: Open-source programming language used mainly for developing server-side applications, dynamic web content, and database interaction.
  16. 2000 - C#: Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft(ECMA) •