Timeline of Programming Languages
| Predecessor(s) | Year | Programming Language | Developer | Company |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Machine Code | 1950 | Assembly Language | Various | N/A |
| Assembly Language | 1952 | Autocode | Alick Glennie | University of Manchester |
| Autocode | 1954 | Fortran | IBM, John Backus | IBM |
| Fortran | 1957 | LISP | John McCarthy | MIT |
| Machine Code, Assembly | 1958 | ALGOL | Fritz Bauer, et al. | ACM |
| ALGOL | 1959 | COBOL | CODASYL committee | CODASYL |
| LISP | 1960 | CPL | Christopher Strachey | University of Oxford |
| LISP, ALGOL | 1964 | BASIC | John Kemeny, Thomas Kurtz | Dartmouth College |
| ALGOL, LISP | 1968 | C | Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson | Bell Labs (AT&T) |
| CPL | 1972 | C++ | Bjarne Stroustrup | Bell Labs (AT&T) |
| Simula | 1972 | Smalltalk | Alan Kay | Xerox PARC |
| Simula, ALGOL, LISP | 1972 | Pascal | Niklaus Wirth | ETH Zurich |
| C, ALGOL, BCPL | 1972 | Java | James Gosling, et al. | Sun Microsystems |
| ALGOL, Simula | 1973 | C# | Microsoft | Microsoft |
| ALGOL, Simula | 1979 | Ada | U.S. Department of Defense | Various |
| C, ALGOL | 1983 | Objective-C | Brad Cox | Stepstone |
| Simula, C, ALGOL | 1987 | Perl | Larry Wall | Various |
| C++, Ada, ALGOL | 1991 | Python | Guido van Rossum | Python Software Foundation |
| C, C++, Java | 1995 | JavaScript | Netscape, Brendan Eich | Netscape, Mozilla |
| C++, Java | 2000 | C# | Microsoft | Microsoft |
| C++, Java, C# | 2010 | Swift | Apple | Apple |
| JavaScript, Python | 2014 | Julia | Jeff Bezanson, et al. | Julia Computing |
| JavaScript, Python | 2014 | Kotlin | JetBrains | JetBrains |
| Various | 2018 | Rust | Mozilla, Graydon Hoare | Mozilla |
| C++, Python, Rust | 2020 | Dart | ||
| N/A | 2021 | COBOL | CODASYL committee | CODASYL |
This table provides a broad overview, and it’s important to note that the relationships between programming languages can be more intricate than a simple predecessor-successor model. Additionally, the development of some languages may have been influenced by multiple predecessors or evolved independently.
