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  *          TIMELINE FOR MAJOR PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES      * 
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Dates reflect when language was first publicly available not development start.
 
Resources:
 http://www.byte.com/art/9509/sec7/art19.htm
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages
 
 
 Plankalkul  1946  Konrad Zuse     German engineer 
 
 FORTRAN     1957  Backus/IBM      scientific use
 
 LISP        1958  McCarthy/MIT    1st functional language; AI
 
 ALGOL       1958  US/Europe - CS  scientific use (basis for Pascal,C,C++, Java)
                   scientists      1st language with formal grammar (BNF)
                                   ALGOL60 Backus/Naur 1st block-structured lang
 
 COBOL       1960  IBM et al/govt  business, government and military use
 
 PL/1        1960  IBM             ALGOL+FORTRAN+COBOL; 1st general purpose  
                                   language - everything but the kitchen sink
 
 SNOBOL      1962  AT&T Bell Labs  string processing; proto-regex and awk 
 
 Simula      1964  Oslo,Norway     ALGOL+classes; 1st OO language; roots of C++  
 
 BASIC       1964  Dartmouth       Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction
                                   Code; designed for non-science students 
 
 APL         1964  Harvard/IBM     basis for Unicode charset; mathematical; 
                                   vectors; matrices
 
 Pascal      1968  N. Wirth        teaching structured programming
 
 SmallTalk   1971  Alan Kay/Xerox  OO; Simula + Lisp; roots of Java 
 
 Prolog      1972  France          1st logic lang; natural language processing; 
                                   AI; theorem proving; declarative paradigm
 
 C           1972  Bell Labs       systems programming - Kernighan & Ritchie

 Objective-C 1981  Stepstone       Smalltalk+C; 1988-NeXT licensed Obj-C; Apple
                                   used Obj-C in MAC OS/X
 
 Ada         1983  DoD             mission-critical DoD embedded applications;
                                   concurrency & reliability $$$$
 
 C++         1983  Stroustroup     Simula + C ; 1st widely used OO language 
                   Bell Labs       procedural and object-oriented paradigm
 
 Perl        1987  Larry Wall      the archetypal scripting language
 
 VisualBasic 1987 Microsoft        drag-n-drop GUI IDE; event driven language 
                                   (integrated development environment)
     
 Python      1991  Guido van Rossum bytecode; Lisp + Perl + SmallTalk 
                                    open source
 
 Ruby        1995  Matsumoto/Japan OO scripting; Python+Smalltalk+Perl+Ada+Lisp
                                   open source
 
 Java        1994  Sun             portable OO; "the network is the computer"
 
 JavaScript  1995  Netscape        client-side scripting for web; event-driven;
                                   C + Self
 
 PHP         1995  Lerdorf/Denmark Perl for the web; server-side scripting; open
                                   source
 
 XSLT        1999  Clark/Kay/W3C*  awk+prolog+LISP; transforms XML files 
  
 C#          2001  Microsoft       .NET / Mono ; the best of C++ and Java  

 F#          2005  F# foundation   open source, functional cross-platform/ .NET
                   Microsoft 

 Swift       2014  Apple           iOS/OS X development; safer than Objective-C;
                                   multi-paradigm 
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