A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
a day ago
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- 1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave 'hello, world' into a tapestry.
- 1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program without having a computer to run it.
- 1936 - Alan Turing and Alonzo Church invent programming languages, but Turing is recruited by British Intelligence.
- 1957 - FORTRAN is created by John Backus and IBM, with strict syntax rules.
- 1958 - LISP is invented by John McCarthy and Paul Graham, but high costs limit its popularity.
- 1959 - Grace Hopper and others create COBOL after losing a bet.
- 1964 - BASIC is created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz for non-computer scientists.
- 1970 - Scheme is created by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman, leading to lambda calculus papers.
- 1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents C and Unix.
- 1973 - Robin Milner creates ML, leading to languages like OCaml and F#.
- 1980 - Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and coins the term 'object-oriented.'
- 1983 - Ada is created by Jean Ichbiah and the US Department of Defense.
- 1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup creates C++ by adding features to C.
- 1987 - Larry Wall creates Perl after hitting his head on a keyboard.
- 1990 - Haskell is created by a committee, featuring monads.
- 1991 - Guido van Rossum invents Python and is declared Dictator for Life.
- 1995 - PHP is created by Rasmus Lerdorf, inspired by spaghetti.
- 1995 - Ruby is created by Yukihiro Matsumoto, later renamed Ruby on Rails.
- 1995 - JavaScript is created by Brendan Eich, originally named LiveScript.
- 1996 - Java is created by James Gosling, marketed as novel despite similarities to other languages.
- 2001 - C# is created by Anders Hejlsberg, also marketed as novel despite similarities to Java.
- 2003 - Scala is created by Martin Odersky, unifying object-oriented and functional programming.