The available programming languages

Here's a list of high-level, general-purpose programming languages that are in fairly common use. They're listed in rough order of age, although the dates given are inaccurate and misleading!

My intention was to give the year in which the language became available for use by the general public, but I've rarely been able to find this date specified explicitly.

Furthermore, the surviving old languages have all been repeatedly redesigned; the newer languages are generally based on or inspired by one or more old languages; so age doesn't make as much difference as you might expect.

I've given some links you can use for further information. These are just suggestions; you can easily find more links by doing a Web search.

Name Date Origin of name Comments
Fortran 1957 FORmula TRANslation The first programming language I ever used was Fortran-66 — a simple and efficient language for numerical computations, traditionally used by engineers. It's been repeatedly redesigned since then.
Lisp 1959 LISt Processing Favoured by academics, used in artificial intelligence research. Features lots of parentheses.
COBOL 1959 COmmon Business-Oriented Language A wordy language traditionally used by companies for boring programs that shuffle employee records around.
BASIC 1964 Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code BASIC was intended as a toy language to introduce students to programming, after which they could go on and do real programming in more capable languages.
PL/I 1965 Programming Language 1 An attempt to assemble the best features of Fortran, COBOL, and Algol into one coherent language. It never really caught on, but seems to be still in use.
APL 1968 A Programming Language A bizarre and cryptic language using mathematical-style notation; requires a special character set. It's said to enable you to write powerful programs with very little source code, if you have the patience to grapple with it.
Forth 1970 "Fourth-generation" in five letters A truly oddball language created by an intelligent eccentric. Very simple and flexible, but perhaps impractical for most people.
Prolog 1972 PROgramming in LOGic Probably used mainly by specialists in logic and artificial intelligence.
Pascal 1974 Blaise Pascal, French 17th-century scientist For years my favourite language, Niklaus Wirth's Pascal is superficially similar to Algol-60, attractive to read, but hampered by inflexible type restrictions. Some of the restrictions were lifted in Borland's hugely popular Turbo Pascal (1983). Borland later added object-oriented extensions, and continues to evolve its version of the language (now sold as Delphi).
C 1978 Successor to B C is another language descended from Algol-60, but its copious use of symbols and its cryptic vocabulary give it an ugly and unfriendly appearance compared with Pascal. Probably because it was used to write Unix, and Unix has been widespread in universities for a long time, it became the favourite language of professional programmers. It lacks the type restrictions that hamper Pascal, so it's more suitable for systems programming, but its lack of any equivalent discipline and heavy use of pointers mean that it's easy to write buggy programs unless you're extremely careful.
Modula-2 1980 Pascal with modules Intended by Niklaus Wirth as a successor to Pascal, but never achieved Pascal's popularity.
Smalltalk 1983 Originally intended for use by children A pure object-oriented language that is simple, elegant, and original, but spoiled by an over-complex class library. I wish they'd stuck to the original aim and kept the whole thing simple enough for children to use.
C++ 1985 C incremented This just adds object-oriented extensions to the older C language. It retains most of the advantages and disadvantages of C, but it's conceptually more complex than C and therefore more difficult to learn and use. The extra complexity may be worth tolerating for large projects, if your only alternative is C; but if you need an object-oriented language it seems more sensible to choose a language designed that way than a language in which objects have been tacked on as an afterthought.
Eiffel 1986 Gustave Eiffel, French engineer An object-oriented language created by two Frenchmen and apparently intended for use by software engineers in large companies.
Ada 1987 Augusta Ada King (1815-1852), Countess of Lovelace, the world's first programmer A Pascal-based language originally created in 1983 for the exclusive use of the U.S. Department of Defense. Made available to the public in 1987, but doesn't seem to have become popular.
Perl 1987 Practical Extraction and Report Language I've used Perl to write a few CGI scripts for Web sites at work. It's vaguely similar to Python (see below), but I'd rather be using Python. Perl is also free, but less well designed and less well documented. However, if you buy a few good books on it, it's easier to use than most other languages. Like Python, it lacks well-integrated GUI facilities; you can use add-on libraries, but of course CGI scripts don't require any GUI.
Visual Basic 1987 BASIC with a visual development environment Windows-only. Brings BASIC into the age of the graphical user interface. It remains, I suspect, a limited and clunky language, but I haven't tried to use it.
Modula-3 1989 A modular language newer than Modula-2 One of those languages that seems to take a feature or two from every previous language. It was a strange decision to call it Modula-3, considering that it wasn't designed by Niklaus Wirth and isn't compatible with Modula-2.
Tcl 1989 Tool command language A scripting language intended to be used in combination with other programming languages. The Tk graphics library was developed in conjunction with it.
Python 1991 Monty Python's Flying Circus An attractively simple (and free!) interpreted language with good basic facilities, which runs on almost any computer once you install the interpreter. I've used it a little at home. It comes with the Tk cross-platform GUI library, which is usable if you buy a book on it, though it's not well-integrated into the language and not documented as part of the language.
Java 1994 Coffee Intended as a simplified and modernized version of C++, Java is for me still not sufficiently simplified or modernized. However, it does at least seem an improvement on C++. It's becoming very popular, and it's very portable from one platform to another, which is of course an asset. However, it's normally implemented as a semi-interpreted language, so the user needs to install an interpreter in order to run Java programs. Some Web browsers include a Java interpreter.
Delphi 1995 Ancient Greek town Windows-only. Delphi is really just Turbo Pascal with object-oriented extensions and a modern visual development environment. It's easier than C++ and more powerful than Visual Basic. I've written a few small programs with it.

Thurb