Who built each language, when it appeared, its standard, paradigms, and where it is used today — 34 languages from Fortran (1957) to Zig, in one reference page.
The lowest-level human-writable language: mnemonics that map almost one-to-one to CPU machine instructions. Each architecture (x86-64, ARM, RISC-V) has its own dialect.
The default shell and scripting language of Linux and macOS. Every developer touches Bash — gluing commands, automating deploys, and writing CI pipelines.
Created by
Brian Fox
Developer
GNU Project (maintainer: Chet Ramey)
Latest
5.3
Standard
POSIX.1-2024 shell (IEEE 1003.1) as baseline, with Bash extensions
An extension of C with classes, templates, and zero-cost abstractions. It powers game engines, browsers, trading systems, and anywhere performance is non-negotiable.
The business-oriented language from 1959 that still processes an estimated 70% of global financial transactions. Banks, insurers, and governments run on it daily.
A dynamic, functional language built on the Erlang VM, delivering massive concurrency with Ruby-inspired syntax. The Phoenix framework makes it a real-time web powerhouse.
Created by
José Valim
Developer
Elixir core team (Dashbit)
Latest
1.18
Standard
No formal standard — defined by the reference implementation on BEAM
Typing
Dynamic, strong (gradual set-theoretic types in progress)
A language built for telecom-grade reliability: systems that run forever, self-heal, and handle millions of concurrent connections. WhatsApp served billions of users with it.
The first widely-used high-level programming language, still unbeaten for raw numerical computation. Weather forecasts and physics simulations run on Fortran today.
A compiled language from Google that prioritizes simplicity, fast builds, and first-class concurrency via goroutines. It is the language of cloud infrastructure.
A purely functional language with lazy evaluation and one of the most advanced type systems in mainstream use. Learning it changes how you think about programming.
Created by
Simon Peyton Jones, Philip Wadler, Haskell Committee
A class-based, object-oriented language built around the 'write once, run anywhere' promise of the JVM. It remains a backbone of enterprise systems, Android, and big data platforms.
Created by
James Gosling
Developer
Oracle Corporation (OpenJDK community)
Latest
Java 25 (LTS)
Standard
Java Language Specification (JLS), governed by the JCP
A high-performance language for scientific computing that aims to be as easy as Python and as fast as C. Its multiple-dispatch design is beloved in numerical computing.
Created by
Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral B. Shah, Alan Edelman
Developer
JuliaLang community / JuliaHub
Latest
1.12
Standard
No formal standard — defined by the reference implementation
A concise, null-safe JVM language and Google's preferred language for Android development. It interoperates 100% with Java and also compiles to JavaScript and native code.
Created by
JetBrains (Andrey Breslav)
Developer
JetBrains & Kotlin Foundation
Latest
2.2
Standard
No formal standard — defined by the Kotlin language specification (JetBrains)
A tiny, fast, embeddable scripting language. It is the standard for game scripting (Roblox, World of Warcraft) and embedded configuration (Neovim, Redis, nginx).
Created by
Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, Waldemar Celes
Developer
PUC-Rio (Lua.org)
Latest
5.4
Standard
No formal standard — defined by the Lua reference manual
A proprietary numeric computing environment and language built around matrix operations. It is the standard tool in engineering education, control systems, and signal processing.
The original language of Mac and iPhone development: C extended with Smalltalk-style message passing. Millions of lines still run inside Apple's frameworks and legacy apps.
Created by
Brad Cox, Tom Love
Developer
Apple Inc.
Latest
Objective-C 2.0
Standard
No formal standard — defined by Apple's compiler (Clang)
An industrial-strength functional language from the ML family with a blazing-fast compiler. It powers Jane Street's trading systems and inspired Rust, F#, and ReScript.
Created by
Xavier Leroy, Damien Doligez, INRIA team
Developer
INRIA / OCaml Foundation
Latest
5.3
Standard
No formal standard — defined by the reference implementation
The original 'Swiss Army chainsaw' of scripting, famous for its text-processing power and regular expressions. It glued together the early web through CGI scripts.
Created by
Larry Wall
Developer
The Perl Foundation / Perl Steering Council
Latest
5.42
Standard
No formal standard — defined by the perl interpreter
A server-side scripting language purpose-built for the web. It still powers most of the internet, including WordPress, Laravel applications, and Facebook's origins.
Created by
Rasmus Lerdorf
Developer
The PHP Group / PHP Foundation
Latest
8.5
Standard
No formal standard — defined by the reference implementation and PHP RFCs
Typing
Dynamic, weak (gradual type declarations since PHP 7)
A high-level, general-purpose language known for its readable syntax and huge ecosystem. It dominates data science, machine learning, automation, and backend web development.
Created by
Guido van Rossum
Developer
Python Software Foundation
Latest
3.14
Standard
No formal standard — defined by the CPython reference implementation and PEPs
A language and environment built for statistical computing and data visualization. It is the lingua franca of statisticians, with CRAN hosting over 20,000 packages.
Created by
Ross Ihaka, Robert Gentleman
Developer
R Core Team / R Foundation
Latest
4.5
Standard
No formal standard — defined by the R reference implementation
A dynamic language designed for programmer happiness, with elegant, human-friendly syntax. Ruby on Rails made it the startup language of the 2000s and it still runs GitHub and Shopify.
Created by
Yukihiro Matsumoto
Developer
Ruby core team
Latest
3.5
Standard
ISO/IEC 30170:2012
Typing
Dynamic, strong (duck typing)
Extensions
.rb, .erb
License
Ruby License / BSD 2-Clause
Object-oriented (everything is an object)ImperativeFunctionalReflective
A systems language that guarantees memory safety without a garbage collector through its ownership and borrowing model. Repeatedly voted the most-loved language by developers.
Created by
Graydon Hoare
Developer
Rust Foundation
Latest
1.90 (Edition 2024)
Standard
No formal standard — defined by the Rust Reference and rustc
A JVM language that fuses object-oriented and functional programming with a powerful static type system. It underpins big data tools like Apache Spark and Kafka.
The dominant language for writing smart contracts on Ethereum and EVM-compatible blockchains. Contracts written in it hold billions of dollars in value.
The declarative standard language for querying and managing relational databases. Fifty years on, it remains the single most transferable skill in data work.
A statically-typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. It brings compile-time type safety and rich editor tooling to large JavaScript codebases.
Created by
Anders Hejlsberg
Developer
Microsoft
Latest
5.9
Standard
No formal standard — defined by the TypeScript compiler (tsc)