Begun in 1958 by an international committee, the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), ALGOL was a hugely influential series of algorithmic programming languages. Culminating in ALGOL 60 in 1960, later languages were heavily influenced by ALGOL’s concepts for lexicon, structure, and syntax. It’s considered the first of the so called…
The Automatically Programmed Tool (APT) programming language was invented at MIT’s legendary Servomechanisms Lab by Douglas T. Ross. The high level code was used to generate instructions for machine tools used in manufacturing. APT is used to calculate a path that a tool must follow to generate a desired form,…
One of the first high level programming languages written for a computer, Plankalkül was created by Konrad Zuse in Nazi Germany during World War II. Stemming from his work on the Z1 and Z2, he developed the language between 1943 and 1945. It was a non-von Neumann, algorithmic language and…
The Ruby programming language was conceived on Feb 24th, 1993 by Yukihiro Matsumoto. It combined Perl-like syntax with object oriented features. Matsumoto has often stated that he wanted a scripting language more powerful than Perl but more object-oriented than Python. Similar to other languages including Lisp, it’s written in C…
HTML is the lingua franca for publishing hypertext on the World Wide Web. It is a non-proprietary format based upon SGML, and can be created and processed by a wide range of tools, from simple plain text editors – you type it in from scratch- to sophisticated WYSIWYG authoring tools….
Java began life at Sun Microsystems in late 1990. It is an object oriented language developed by James Gosling and colleagues. It was originally called “Oak” after the tree outside of Gosling’s window and is often confused with Javascript, which is bears no similarity to it except in syntax and…
Invented by Bell Labs employee Larry Wall in 1987 and released to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup on December 18th, 1987, this venerable scripting language had originally been intended to manipulate text information. It was based on the C language and later went on to play an important role in the development…
Bjarne Stroustrup invented C++ in 1983 while working at Bell Labs, improving on the original C language. An extension to C, it is a descendent of the language B developed by Ken Thompson for the Unix operating system, and unlike C it is an object oriented language.
The original concept of relational databases was introduced with the publication of “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Databanks” in 1970 by Dr. E.F.Codd. The SQL language itself was originally created by Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce at IBM based on Codd’s model in the early 70s. Originally…
The C programming language was invented at Bell Labs in the early 70s by Dennis Ritchie and was intended to be used with Unix. It has since become a widely used language in many areas including system software and in computer science education. It has spawned C++ and influenced many…