1970 PASCAL
Niklaus Wirth developed this programming language 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, templates, and virtual functions. 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.