There are many programming languages out there in software world and they are still coming like Scala, Go, Closure etc, but only handful of them has managed to survive till date. These are the ones who has contributed immensely in software development. Since, programming language is single most important thing in software development world, it’s often discussed, criticized and improved over the years. Programmers and developers, who created those programming language are icons of programming world and sometime I feel sad when a guy using a programming language doesn’t know, who is behind that. Though it happens less often with more popular programming language like Java, where everybody knows James Gosling as father of Java, not every developer know who created Perl, Pascal, Lisp or Erlang. These thoughts motivates me to collect and share, names of programmer and designers, behind 10 of the most popular and successful programming languages. On my search I bump into a nice info-graphic, which I have shared with your guys at the bottom of this post. The infographic also puts together 10 of the most popular programming language of last 50 years, I thought to share with you guys.

Top 10 Programming Language and their Inventors

Here is my list of top 10 programming language and their creators. Languages are listed on no particular order, but since I am a Java developer and benefited a lot from Java, I have no hesitation to put it on top of the list. I know many C programmer will not agree as C is the longest surviving, yet going strong programming language, but this is not about ranking but about knowing and remembering their creators. The master programmers who has made difference in the world of programming language and software development.

1) Java – James Gosling

Java is one of the most popular and successful programming language. Dr. James Arthur Gosling is invented Java and best known as the father of the Java programming language. Java was developed and supported earlier by Sun Microsystem and now by Oracle, after their acquisition of Sun Microsystem on January 2010. Java is created with mission WORA, “Write Once Run Anywhere” and platform independence of Java is one of the pillar of it’s success in the enterprise world. Till date, it is one of the most popular application programming language.

2) C – Dennis Ritchie

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, An American computer scientist, created the C programming language between 1967 and 1973 at AT&T Bell labs. C is still very popular and used extensively in System programming. It’s older than Java but still maintains it’s stronghold. By the way Dennis Ritchie has also created world famous UNIX operating system, with his long-time colleague Ken Thompson. If you compare his popularity with Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, he is no where but if you compare Dennis’ contribution to the software world, he has no matching. Every Programmer must know about Dennis Ritchie and his contribution to the programming world.

 
3) C++ – Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne Stroustrup; born 30 December 1950 in Aarhus, Denmark is a Danish computer scientist, most notable for the creation and the development of the widely-used C++ programming language. C++, as name suggested is the next generation language at time C was popular. It comes with object oriented programming feature which was considered phenomenal compared to structural way of C programming. C++ is still one of the very popular language and used extensively in high frequency trading world because of its close proximity with native System and popular object oriented feature.

4) Python – Guido van Rossum

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language, whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Its syntax is said to be clear and expressive.Python is designed by Guido van Rossum of CWI. In United states, Python has actually replaced Java at academic level, now days students are started learning programming using Python instead of C or Java, as was the case of previous generation. If you are still not sure whether to use Python or Java to start with programming, this infographic may help you. Python is used extensively in web application development, there are lots of python based web framework out there, software development and information security. Python is also used extensively by tech giants like Google, Yahoo and Spotify.

 
5) PHP – Rasmus Lerdorf

No matter how much you hate PHP, you just can’t ignore the fact that half of the internet is running on this wonderful internet language. PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. The main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the formal reference to the PHP language. That time, PHP was a competitor to Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) server-side script engine and similar languages e.g. Java Server Pages (JSP), but gradually received better acceptance and is now installed on more than 20 million Web sites and 1 million Web servers. It is also open source and used by internet giants like Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress and Joomla. PHP is used extensively to to build dynamic web pages and server side development. Sorry, I forgot to tell you the full form of PHP, any guess? Its Personal Home Page initially now its name is hypertext pre processor:)

6) Perl – Larry Wall

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. designed and developed by Larry Wall in the mid-1980’s. Perl rose to fame because of its excellent text processing capability. It is still main language to develop reports, scripts on UNIX systems. Perl is known for parsing and processing large text files and its used in CGI, database applications, network programming and graphics programming. Perl is also used extensively by internet companies like IMDB, Amazon, and Priceline. For Java developers, adding Perl or Python in their portfolio is good addition because you often need a scripting language to do adhoc tasks for maintenance and support purpose.

 
7) JavaScript – Brendan Eich

If you ask me, which language is the winner in last 5 to 10 years, I would say JavaScript. It has clearly dominated the client side scripting space in recent past with libraries like jQuery and now moving to Server side development with libraries like node.js. JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions, designed by Brendan Eich and developed by Netscape Communications Corporation. JavaScript is used extensively for client side scripting, validation, animation, event capturing, form submission and other common task. It runs inside browser and used by almost all websites e.g. Gmail, Mozila Firefox etc.
8) Ruby – Yukihiro Matsumoto

Ruby was first designed and developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto in Japan. Its fun working with Ruby and if you tried Ruby with Rails you know what I mean. Ruby is influenced by Perl, Ada, Lisp and Smalltalk and designed for productive and enjoyable programming. Ruby is mostly used for web application development and used by major sites like Twitter, Hulu and Groupon.

9) Lisp – John McCarthy

John McCarthy , second oldest high level programming language. Lisp stands for List processor. I have never tried Lisp but its said to be father of functional programming language e.g. Haskell, Erlang or Scala. It is used for AL development and air defense system.
10) Pascal – Niklaus Wirth

Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968–1969 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.

and here is the infographic, which gives you a nice overview of 10 programming language and their creators. It contains some of the language mentioned here, plus some additional language like FORTRAN and Ada.

That’s all about top 10 programming languages and their creators. They have made huge difference in programming world and without their contribution, we would not be here. Some of them are here with us and some of them has left us for better place, let’s remember them for their contribution to our programming world.