Computer Language and OOP History

• 1957 Fortran by John Backus (IBM): Still favorite language of physicists.
• 1959 Lisp (LISt Processing) introduced by McCarthy: First to use recursion, first-class functions, garbage collection. Intended for AI.
• 1960 Cobol (Common Business Oriented Language).
• 1960 Algol (ALGOrithmic Language): Block structure, data types, BNF notation.
• 1964 Basic by Kemeny and Kurtz.
• 1967 Simula: Introduced classes, coroutines, instancing (data abstraction).
• 1971 Pascal from Niklaus Wirth: Intended as stepping-stone to learn Algo and Fortran.
• 1972 C from Dennis Ritchie: Born out of Pascal, B and BCPL. Built for Unix, fast and low-level.
• 1972 Prolog: Logic, rule-based language (predicate calculus), used in AI.
• 1975 Scheme by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman: simplified Lisp.
• 1979 Common LISP Object System
• 1980 (1970 to 1983) Smalltalk by Alan Kay: Pure OO language (partly based on Simula).
• 1983 Objective C
• 1984 Ada commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defence: For real-time systems, e.g., used for controlers in air-planes.
• 1986 (1991 release 3.0) C++ started by Bjarne Stroustroup: Speed of C with OO features, includes templates and multiple inheritance.
• 1987 Actor, Eiffel by Bertrand Meyer: Intended to be OO and multi-platform. Based on ideas of C++.
• 1996 Java by James Gosling (at SUN Micro Systems): Uses a virtual machine, almost all features of C++.
• 1987 Perl by Larry Wall: Scripting Language, combines C, awk, sed, sh, and BASIC.
• 1991 Python by Van Rossum.
• 1995 PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) by Rasmus Lerdorf.
• 1995 Ruby by Yukihiro Matsumoto: High-level OO scripting languages.
• 1995 Lingo by John Thompson: Scripting language for Windows, used by Director. Written for non-programmers.
• 2001 (2004 version 2.0) ActionScript by Macromedia: Introduced with Flash, reminds of JavaScript.

The Computer Languages Timeline gives an overview about the connection between computer languages (original from www.levenez.com).

1954		1980			1995			2003