A Chronology of Influential Computer Languages

Konrad Zuse in Nazi Germany may have developed the first real computer programming language, "Plankalkul" ca. 1945. This is mentioned in the 1978 ACM History of Programming Languages FORTRAN session.

According to Sammet, over 200 programming languages were developed between 1952 and 1972, but she considered only about 13 of them to be significant.

Here's a chronological list of computer languages that we consider to have had the most influence.

1957 FORTRAN
1958 ALGOL
1960 LISP
1960 COBOL
1962 APL
1962 SIMULA
1964 BASIC
1964 PL/I
1966 ISWIM
1970 Prolog
1972 C
1975 Pascal
1975 Scheme
1977 OPS5
1978 CSP
1978 FP
1980 dBASE II
1983 Smalltalk-80
1983 Ada
1983 Parlog
1984 Standard ML
1986 C++
1986 CLP(R)
1986 Eiffel
1988 CLOS
1988 Mathematica
1988 Oberon
1989 HTML
1990 Haskell