Copyright (C) 2016, H. Conrad Cunningham

Acknowledgements: I adapted and revised much of this work from my prototype notes on Functional Programming Using Haskell.

1950's

• Fortran, 1957; imperative, first compiler, math-like scientific programming; Backus at IBM

• Lisp, 1958; imperative and functional features, homoiconic; McCarthy at MIT

• Algol, 1958, 1960; imperative, nested block structure, lexical scoping BNF; international team

• COBOL, 1959; imperative, business programming; Grace Hopper

1960's

• Simula 1962, 1967; imperative, simulation, Simula 67 first OO language in Scandinavian school; Dahl & Nygaard in Norway

• Snobol, 1962; imperative, string processing, first-class patterns; Farber, Griswold, & Polonsky at AT&T Bell Labs

• PL/I, 1964; imperative, merge scientific, business, and systems programming; IBM

• BASIC, 1964; imperative, interactive timesharing; Kemeny & Kurtz at Dartmouth

• Algol 68, 1968; imperative, ambitious successor to Algol 60, very complex, great influence, not widely implemented; international team

1970's

• Pascal, 1970; imperative, simplified Algol-like language, used in teaching, on VM on early microcomputers; Wirth (Switzerland) from frustration with Algol 68

• Prolog, 1972; first logic language; Colmerauer in France

• C, 1972; imperative systems language for Unix; Ritchie at AT&T Bell Labs

• Smalltalk, 1972; imperative, first OO language in American school, message-passing; Kay at Xerox PARC

• ML, 1973; mostly functional, polymorphic static types, algebraic data types; Milner at Edinburgh

• Scheme, 1975; minimalist Lisp, lexical scoping, tail calls, continuations; Steele and Sussman at MIT

• Icon, 1977; imperative, structured programming successor to Snobol, goal-directed execution; Griswold at Arizona

1980's

• C++, 1980; C with Simula-like classes; Stroustrup in Denmark,

• Ada, 1983; imperative, modular, intended standard language for military applications; US DoD & Ichbiah in France

• Eiffel, 1985; imperative OO language, strong software engineering concepts (e.g. design by contract); Meyer in France

• Objective C, 1986; C with Smalltalk-like messaging; Cox & Love at Stepstone, selected by Jobs for NeXT, continued by Apple

• Erlang, 1986; message-passing concurrency on dynamically typed functional base (actors), fault-tolerant/real-time systems; Armstrong, Virding, & Williams at Ericsson (Sweden)

• Self, 1986; Smalltalk dialect, first prototype-based OO language, used VM with JIT; Ungar & Randall at Xerox PARC/Stanford/Sun

• Perl, 1987; dynamic imperative language, text-processing using regular expressions; Wall

1990's

• Haskell, 1990; purely functional, lazily evaluated, strictly typed, widely used in research; international committee

• Python, 1991; imperative, dynamically typed multiparadigm language; van Rossum in the Netherlands

• Ruby, 1993; imperative, dynamically typed, object-oriented, metaprogramming, DSLs; Matsumoto in Japan, popularized by Ruby on Rails

• Lua, 1993; imperative, dynamically typed, minimalistic but powerful, embedding scripting, written in standard C; Ierusalimschy, de Figueiredo, & Celes in Brazil

• R, 1993; statistical computing and graphics, open-source S; Ihaka, & Gentleman in New Zealand

• Java, 1995; imperative statically typed OO, VM, Java 8 has functional features; Sun/Oracle

• JavaScript (ECMAScript), 1995; client-side web programming, Scheme- and Self-like internals but Java-like syntax; Eich at Netscape with 12-day deadline, successful too quickly

• PHP, 1995; server-side scripting; Lerdorf from Canada, evolved organically

• OCaml (Objective Caml), 1996; ML dialect adding OO constructs, focusing on performance and practical use; Xavier Leroy in France

2000's

• C#, 2001; imperative statically typed OO; Microsoft to replace Java on Common Language Infrastructure (CLI)

• F#, 2002; OCaml adapted for Microsoft's CLI; Syme at Microsoft Research in the UK,

• Scala, 2003; hybrid functional/object on JVM; Odersky at EPFL in Switzerland

• Groovy, 2003; dynamically typed OO scripting language on JVM; proposed by Strachan

• miniKanren, 2005; relational language, extension to other languages (e.g., Scheme, Clojure); Friedman at Indiana,

• Clojure, 2007; Lisp dialect originally on JVM, emphasis on functional programming, concurrency, & immutable data structures; Rich Hickey

2010's

• Idris, 2011-16; eagerly evaluated, Haskell-like with dependent types; Edwin Brady from UK

• Julia, 2012; dynamic language for high-performance scientific programming

• Elixir, 2012-14; functional concurrent language, Erlang VM, influenced by Erlang, Ruby, and Clojure; Jose Valim from Brazil

• Elm, 2012-17; Haskell-like functional language, compiles to JavaScript, reactive-style programming; Evan Czaplicki in senior thesis at Harvard

• Rust, 2012-15; imperative systems language, safety and performance, targeted to replace C and C++, Graydon Hoare at Mozilla

• Swift, 2014; Apple's replacement for Objective C, safety; "Objective C without the C"

• etc.