A History of Programming Languages

After roughly three years of development, John Backus' team at IBM completed and shipped the first compiler for FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator), the first practical high-level programming language, targeting the IBM 704. The transition point from writing assembly directly to writing mathematics in something close to mathematical notation; every high-level language that followed descends from it.

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International Business Machines (IBM)

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A General History of Information Technology

Designed by John McCarthy at MIT for AI research—the second high-level language. S-expressions uniformly expressing code and data, recursion, list processing, garbage collection, first-class functions: many of the ideas later languages would rediscover were already present at the start. The lineage that includes Scheme, Common Lisp, Clojure, and—indirectly—Haskell and other functional languages begins here.

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John McCarthy

A CODASYL committee, sponsored by the US Department of Defense, completed the first specification of COBOL—the Common Business-Oriented Language. Carrying forward Grace Hopper's earlier compiler work, its English-like syntax and fixed-point arithmetic made it the mainstream language of finance, insurance, and government systems. More than 65 years after the specification, in 2026, banking, pension, and tax systems still run on tens of billions of lines of COBOL in production.

Developed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, and others, Smalltalk was released externally as Smalltalk-80. Everything an object, message passing as the only operation—the pure object-oriented design directly or indirectly shaped the object models of Objective-C, Ruby, Java, C#, and many of the major languages that followed.

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Alan Kay

Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs released C++ commercially, extending C with object-oriented features derived from Simula. The design goal—matching C in performance while adding abstraction—made C++ a default in domains that demand both low-level control and high-level structure: game engines, trading systems, embedded devices, browser implementations.

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Bell Labs

Designed at CWI in the Netherlands by Guido van Rossum out of dissatisfaction with the teaching language ABC. Simple, readable syntax; duck typing; an extensive standard library; and—later—the culture that calls itself 'Pythonic'. Python became the default language of web development (Django, Flask) in the 2000s, of scientific computing and data science (NumPy, SciPy, pandas) in the 2010s, and—since the late 2010s—of machine learning (TensorFlow, PyTorch).

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Guido van Rossum

James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems renamed Oak, originally a language for embedded consumer electronics, to Java and released it officially as a way to run code as applets inside web browsers. The 'Write Once, Run Anywhere' slogan and the portability of the Java Virtual Machine pulled enterprise software development decisively toward Java. Stewardship moved to Oracle in 2010 with the Sun acquisition, but the ecosystem—Spring, Hadoop, Android (which derives from Java)—remains enormous.

Brendan Eich at Netscape designed a lightweight scripting language for the browser in ten days. Originally Mocha, then LiveScript, finally JavaScript—the last name chosen to benefit, ironically, from the popularity of an unrelated language. JavaScript was treated as a toy for years; then came V8 in 2009, Node.js, server-side JavaScript, and the UI framework wave of React, Vue, and Angular. It is now one of the most widely written languages in the world.

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Brendan Eich

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A History of the Internet and the Web

Designed in Japan by Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto—a pure object-oriented scripting language combining the object model of Smalltalk with the expressiveness of Perl, with 'programmer happiness' as an explicit design goal. The 2004 release of David Heinemeier Hansson's Ruby on Rails web framework made it a global success and the default toolkit of the early-stage web-startup culture: GitHub, early Twitter, early Airbnb, Shopify, and many others.

A systems programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson (the UNIX author). Starting from frustration with C++ build times and complexity, it combined garbage collection, lightweight concurrency via goroutines, and a deliberately simple syntax. Most of the cloud-native infrastructure of the 2010s—Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus—is written in Go.

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Ken Thompson

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Google

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A History of Cloud Computing

Started as a personal project by Mozilla's Graydon Hoare around 2010 and shepherded to release by Mozilla. Its distinguishing design is static checking of ownership and borrowing, providing memory safety without garbage collection. Selected as the 'most loved' language in Stack Overflow's annual survey from 2016 for several years in a row, Rust has been adopted into the Linux kernel (2022) and is steadily displacing C and C++ in security-sensitive domains.