A Sampling of Historically Significant Languages

IBM's FORTRAN, COBOL, and PL/I

FORTRAN is generally regarded as the very first high-level computer programming language.  The name of the language is derived from the title "The IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System".  As it's name implies, FORTRAN's strength was enabling programmers to write code that would compute mathematical formulas.

COBOL (short for COmmon Business-Oriented Language) was developed for business applications.  Much of today's business application software is still written in legacy COBOL code.

PL/I (short for Programming Language One) was IBM's attempt to make a high-level language that could be used for any conceivable purpose.  While it had limited measure of success it has been replaced with newer languages.  It's significance in programming language history is that it was the first language that was not designed for a specific area of application.  I.E. It was the first general-purpose high-level computer programming language.

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ALGOL and Pascal

ALGOL (short for ALGOrithmic Language) was a commercial failure but had a great impact on computer programming.  While ALGOL itself was not widely adopted many of the conventions introduced by the language have been used by almost all subsequent languages.  Also, most of the classic algorithm texts use ALGOL as the language to express the algorithm.  Thus, ALGOL has become the common language for computer professionals to write and describe algorithms.

Pascal (named for French mathematician Blaise Pascal) was written by Niklaus Wirth and is part of the ALGOL family.  It's primary function was as a teaching language and was the teaching languages of choice for many decades.

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Smalltalk

Smalltalk was created at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) by a team led by Alan Kay.  One of the distinguishing characteristics of smalltalk is that it is an object-oriented programming language.  Smalltalk was first widely released in 1980.  According to Ala Kay, the name of the language comes from the fact that the language should be intuitive enough that even children (i.e. the small talkers) could program using the language.

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C and C++

According to language co-creator Dennis Ritchie "The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system."  C is sometimes referred to as a lower level high-level programming language.  The reason is that the C programming language will allow low level control of the computer architecture.  This feature is a result of its historical ties as a systems language for Unix.

There are many versions and descendants of the C proramming language.  The most successful has been C++ developed by Bjarne Stroustrup.

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BASIC

BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was developed at Dartmouth College in 1964 to give non-science students access to computers and computer programming.  It gained in popularity with the introduction of the personal computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Those early PCs had very small amounts of main memory and the compilation of programs require a significant amount of memory.  Fortunately, BASIC is an intepreted language and thus required much less memory in order to facilitate programming.

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Other Resources and Timelines