From Assembly to Go: A Journey Through 70 Years of Programming Languages

Programming languages are standardized sets of syntax rules that allow humans to give precise instructions to computers, defining data structures and actions for various situations.

1951 – Regional Assembly Language

1952 – Autocode

1954 – IPL (ancestor of LISP)

1955 – FLOW-MATIC (ancestor of COBOL)

1957 – FORTRAN (first compiled language)

1957 – COMTRAN (ancestor of COBOL)

1958 – LISP

1958 – ALGOL 58

1959 – FACT (ancestor of COBOL)

1959 – COBOL

1959 – RPG

1962 – APL

1962 – Simula

1962 – SNOBOL

1963 – CPL (ancestor of C)

1964 – BASIC

1964 – PL/I

1966 – JOSS

1967 – BCPL (ancestor of C)

1968 – Logo

1969 – B (ancestor of C)

1970 – Pascal

1970 – Forth

1972 – C

1972 – Smalltalk

1972 – Prolog

1973 – ML

1975 – Scheme

1978 – SQL

1980 – C++ (class-based C, renamed in July 1983)

1983 – Ada

1984 – Common Lisp

1984 – MATLAB

1985 – Eiffel

1986 – Objective‑C

1986 – Erlang

1987 – Perl

1988 – Tcl

1988 – Mathematica

1989 – FL

1990 – Haskell

1991 – Python

1991 – Visual Basic

1993 – Ruby

1993 – Lua

1994 – CLOS (part of ANSI Common Lisp)

1995 – Java

1995 – Delphi (Object Pascal)

1995 – JavaScript

1995 – PHP

1996 – WebDNA

1997 – Rebol

1999 – D

2000 – ActionScript

2001 – C#

2001 – Visual Basic .NET

2002 – F#

2003 – Groovy

2003 – Scala

2007 – Clojure

2009 – Go

2011 – Dart

From 1951 to 2014, humanity invented 256 programming languages, each introducing new features, and the evolution continues with new languages emerging beyond this list.

Source: 《算法与数学之美》