【编程语言编年史】从1951年至今，人类一共发明了256种编程语言，每一种语言都并非彼此独立的。但我们都知道，真正经常被使用，或者说较为实用的编程语言便没有这么多！下图为编程语言历史的一张信息图。看懂了这张图，你便懂得了编程语言的“发家史”。每一种语言的出现都带有某些新特征。编程语言不断的在革新，很快就会有超出这个清单的新编程语言出现。
- 1951 – Regional Assembly Language
- 1952 – Autocode
- 1954 – IPL (forerunner to LISP)
- 1955 – FLOW-MATIC (forerunner to COBOL)
- 1957 – FORTRAN (First compiler)
- 1957 – COMTRAN (forerunner to COBOL)
- 1958 – LISP
- 1958 – ALGOL 58
- 1959 – FACT (forerunner to COBOL)
- 1959 – COBOL
- 1959 – RPG
- 1962 – APL
- 1962 – Simula
- 1962 – SNOBOL
- 1963 – CPL (forerunner to C)
- 1964 – BASIC
- 1964 – PL/I
- 1966 – JOSS
- 1967 – BCPL (forerunner to C)
- 1968 – Logo
- 1969 – B (forerunner to C)
- 1970 – Pascal
- 1970 – Forth
- 1972 – C
- 1972 – Smalltalk
- 1972 – Prolog
- 1973 – ML
- 1975 – Scheme
- 1978 – SQL
- 1980 – C++ (as C with classes, name changed in July 1983)
- 1983 – Ada
- 1984 – Common Lisp
- 1984 – MATLAB
- 1985 – Eiffel
- 1986 – Objective-C
- 1986 – Erlang
- 1987 – Perl
- 1988 – Tcl
- 1988 – Mathematica
- 1989 – FL
- 1990 – Haskell
- 1991 – Python
- 1991 – Visual Basic
- 1993 – Ruby
- 1993 – Lua
- 1994 – CLOS (part of ANSI Common Lisp)
- 1995 – Java
- 1995 – Delphi (Object Pascal)
- 1995 – JavaScript
- 1995 – PHP
- 1996 – WebDNA
- 1997 – Rebol
- 1999 – D
- 2000 – ActionScript
- 2001 – C#
- 2001 – Visual Basic .NET
- 2002 – F#
- 2003 – Groovy
- 2003 – Scala
- 2007 – Clojure
- 2009 – Go
- 2011 – Dart