History

The origins of different programming languages, who created them, when, and why.

JavaScript

Created by Brendan Eich in 1995 while at Netscape, reportedly designed and prototyped in about ten days. Originally called Mocha, then LiveScript, it was renamed JavaScript for marketing reasons tied to the popularity of Java at the time. It was later standardized as ECMAScript.

Python

Created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991 as a successor to the ABC language. The name comes from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, reflecting van Rossum’s desire for a fun, readable language.

TypeScript

Developed by Microsoft, with Anders Hejlsberg as lead architect, and first released publicly in 2012. It was created to bring static typing and better tooling to large JavaScript codebases as web applications grew in scale and complexity.

Java

Created by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems, released in 1995. It began in 1991 as a project called Oak intended for interactive television and set-top boxes before being retargeted at the emerging web.

C#

Designed by Microsoft, with Anders Hejlsberg as chief architect, and released in 2000 alongside the .NET Framework. It was created to give .NET a modern, type-safe managed language comparable to Java.

C++

Created by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs, starting in 1979 as “C with Classes” and released under the C++ name in 1985. It extended C with object-oriented and later generic programming features while retaining low-level control.

C

Developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs between 1969 and 1973, growing out of the earlier B language. It was created largely to rewrite the Unix operating system in a portable, higher-level language than assembly.

PHP

Originally written by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 as a set of Common Gateway Interface scripts called “Personal Home Page Tools.” It evolved through contributions from others into a full scripting language for dynamic web pages.

Go

Designed at Google starting in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, and released publicly in 2009. It grew out of frustration with slow builds and complexity in the large C++ services Google maintained.

Rust

Begun as a personal project by Graydon Hoare in 2006 and later sponsored by Mozilla starting around 2009. It reached its 1.0 stable release in 2015, aimed at systems programming with guaranteed memory safety.

Kotlin

Developed by JetBrains and first unveiled in 2011, reaching a stable 1.0 release in 2016. It is named after Kotlin Island near Saint Petersburg, echoing Java’s naming after an island as well.

Ruby

Created by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto in Japan, with first public release in 1995. It blended ideas from Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, and Lisp to make a language Matsumoto felt was more enjoyable to write.

Dart

Created by Google, unveiled in 2011 with Lars Bak and Kasper Lund among its lead designers. It was originally pitched as a structured replacement for JavaScript in the browser, but found its lasting purpose after Google paired it with the Flutter UI toolkit in 2017.

Swift

Introduced by Apple in 2014, led primarily by Chris Lattner, as a modern replacement for Objective-C on Apple platforms. It was open-sourced in 2015 to broaden its use beyond Apple’s ecosystem.

Perl

Created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987 while he worked as a systems administrator, intended as a practical tool for scanning text and generating reports on Unix. It grew rapidly through the 1990s to become a dominant language for web CGI scripting.

Elixir

Created by José Valim, a former Ruby on Rails core team member, and first released in 2011. It was built on top of the battle-tested Erlang VM to combine Ruby-like ergonomics with Erlang’s concurrency and fault tolerance.

Scala

Created by Martin Odersky at EPFL and first released in 2004. It was designed to unify object-oriented and functional programming on the JVM, with the name itself short for “scalable language.”

Clojure

Created by Rich Hickey and released in 2007 as a modern Lisp dialect targeting the JVM. Hickey built it to bring Lisp’s simplicity and functional programming, backed by immutable, persistent data structures, to practical concurrent application development.

Haskell

Named after logician Haskell Curry and designed by a committee of academic researchers starting in 1987, with its first version released in 1990. It emerged from a desire to unify the many competing non-strict, purely functional research languages of the era into a single open standard.