page_title: History of programming languages
section_title: Prominent people
hierarchical_section_title: History of programming languages / Prominent people
caption_attribution_description: English: Commodore Grace M. Hopper, USNR Official portrait photograph.
context_page_description: The history of programming languages spans from documentation of early mechanical computers to modern tools for software development. Early programming languages were highly specialized, relying on mathematical notation and similarly obscure syntax. Throughout the 20th century, research in compiler theory led to the creation of high-level programming languages, which use a more accessible syntax to communicate instructions.
  The first high-level programming language was Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. The first high-level language to have an associated compiler was created by Corrado Böhm in 1951, for his PhD thesis. The first commercially available language was FORTRAN, developed in 1956 by a team led by John Backus at IBM.
context_section_description: Some key people who helped develop programming languages:
  Alan Cooper, developer of Visual Basic.
  Alan Kay, pioneering work on object-oriented programming, and originator of Smalltalk.
  Anders Hejlsberg, developer of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript.
  Arthur Whitney, developer of A+, k, and q.
  Bertrand Meyer, inventor of Eiffel.
  Bjarne Stroustrup, developer of C++.
  Brian Kernighan, co-author of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie, coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages.
  Chris Lattner, creator of Swift and LLVM.
  Cleve Moler, creator of MATLAB.
  Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C. Unix Operating System, Plan 9 Operating System.
  Douglas McIlroy, influenced and designed such languages as SNOBOL, TRAC, PL/I, ALTRAN, TMG and C++.
  Grace Hopper, first to use the term compiler and developer of FLOW-MATIC, influenced development of COBOL. Popularized machine-independent programming languages and the term "debugging".
  Guido van Rossum, creator of Python.
  James Gosling, lead developer of Java and its precursor, Oak.
  Jean Ichbiah, chief designer of Ada, Ada 83.
  Jean-Yves Girard, co-inventor of the polymorphic lambda calculus (System F).
  Jeff Bezanson, main designer, and one of the core developers of Julia.
  Jeffrey Snover, inventor of PowerShell.
  Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang.
  John Backus, inventor of Fortran and cooperated in the design of ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60.
  John C. Reynolds, co-inventor of the polymorphic lambda calculus (System F).
  John McCarthy, inventor of LISP.
  John von Neumann, originator of the operating system concept.
  Graydon Hoare, inventor of Rust.
  Ken Thompson, inventor of B, Go, Inferno (operating system) and Unix Operating System co-author.
  Kenneth E. Iverson, developer of APL, and co-developer of J along with Roger Hui.
  Konrad Zuse, designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül (which influenced ALGOL 58).
  Kristen Nygaard, pioneered object-oriented programming, co-invented Simula.
  Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language (see Perl and Raku).
  Martin Odersky, creator of Scala, and previously a contributor to the design of Java.
  Martin Richards developed the BCPL programming language, forerunner of the B and C languages.
  Nathaniel Rochester, inventor of first assembler (IBM 701).
  Niklaus Wirth, inventor of Pascal, Modula and Oberon.
  Ole-Johan Dahl, pioneered object-oriented programming, co-invented Simula.
  Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP.
  Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure.
  Robert Gentleman, co-creator of R.
  Robert Griesemer, co-creator of Go.
  Robin Milner, inventor of ML, and sharing credit for Hindley–Milner polymorphic type inference.
  Rob Pike, co-creator of Go, Inferno (operating system) and Plan 9 (operating system) Operating System co-author.
  Ross Ihaka, co-creator of R.
  Stanley Cohen, inventor of Speakeasy, which was created with an OOPS, object-oriented programming system, the first instance, in 1964.
  Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica.
  Tom Love and Brad Cox, creator of Objective-C.
  Walter Bright, creator of D.
  Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby.
caption: Grace M. Hopper
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