Programming Languages

Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc. for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Linux. Swift is designed to work with Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks and the large body of existing Objective-C (ObjC) code written for Apple products. It is built with the open source LLVM compiler framework and has been included in Xcode since version 6. On platforms other than Linux, it uses the Objective-C runtime library which allows C, Objective-C, C++ and Swift code to run within one program.

Julia is a high-level dynamic programming language designed to address the needs of high-performance numerical analysis and computational science, without the typical need of separate compilation to be fast, while also being effective for general-purpose programming, web use or as a specification language.

TypeScript is a free and open-source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript, and adds optional static typing to the language. Anders Hejlsberg, lead architect of C# and creator of Delphi and Turbo Pascal, has worked on the development of TypeScript. TypeScript may be used to develop JavaScript applications for client-side or server-side (Node.js) execution.

TypeScript is designed for development of large applications and compiles to JavaScript. As TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, existing JavaScript programs are also valid TypeScript programs.

Kotlin is a statically-typed programming language that runs on the Java virtual machine and also can be compiled to JavaScript source code or use the LLVM compiler infrastructure. Its primary development is from a team of JetBrains programmers based in Saint Petersburg, Russia. While the syntax is not compatible with Java, Kotlin is designed to interoperate with Java code and is reliant on Java code from the existing Java Class Library, such as the collections framework.

Dart is a general-purpose programming language originally developed by Google and later approved as a standard by Ecma (ECMA-408). It is used to build web, server and mobile applications, and for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It is open-source software under a permissive free software license (modified BSD license).

Dart is an object-oriented, class defined, single inheritance language using a C-style syntax that transcompiles optionally into JavaScript. It supports interfaces, mixins, abstract classes, reified generics, optional typing, and a sound type system.

Multi-paradigm: scripting, object-oriented (class-based), imperative, reflective, functional

Rust is a systems programming language sponsored by Mozilla Research, which describes it as a "safe, concurrent, practical language," supporting functional and imperative-procedural paradigms. Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but its designers intend it to provide better memory safety while maintaining performance.

Rust is an open source programming language. Its designers have refined the language through the experiences of writing the Servo web browser layout engine and the Rust compiler. A large portion of current commits to the project are from community members.

Multi-paradigm: compiled, concurrent, functional, imperative, structured, generic

Go (often referred to as golang) is a programming language created at Google in 2009 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It is a compiled, statically typed language in the tradition of Algol and C, with garbage collection, limited structural typing, memory safety features and CSP-style concurrent programming features added. The compiler and other language tools originally developed by Google are all free and open source.

compiled, concurrent, imperative, structured

Clojure is a dialect of the Lisp programming language. Clojure is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on functional programming. It runs on the Java virtual machine and the Common Language Runtime. Like other Lisps, Clojure treats code as data and has a macro system. The current development process is community-driven, overseen by Rich Hickey as its benevolent dictator for life (BDFL).

Clojure encourages immutability and immutable data structures. While its type system is entirely dynamic, recent efforts have also sought the implementation of gradual typing. Clojure encourages programmers to be explicit about managing state and identity. This focus on programming with immutable values and explicit progression-of-time constructs is intended to facilitate developing more robust programs, especially multithreaded ones.

functional

PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language. Initially a Windows component only, known as Windows PowerShell, it was made open-source and cross-platform on 18 August 2016 with the introduction of PowerShell Core. The former is built on .NET Framework while the latter on .NET Core.

In PowerShell, administrative tasks are generally performed by cmdlets (pronounced command-lets), which are specialized .NET classes implementing a particular operation. These work by accessing data in different data stores, like the file system or registry, which are made available to PowerShell via providers. Third-party developers can develop their own cmdlets and add them to PowerShell. Sets of cmdlets may be combined into scripts.

F# (pronounced F sharp) is a strongly typed, multi-paradigm programming language that encompasses functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming methods. F# is most often used as a cross-platform Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) language, but it can also generate JavaScript and graphics processing unit (GPU) code.

multi-paradigm: functional, imperative, object-oriented, metaprogramming, reflective, concurrent

Scala is a general-purpose programming language providing support for functional programming and a strong static type system. Designed to be concise, many of Scala's design decisions aimed to address criticisms of Java.

Scala source code is intended to be compiled to Java bytecode, so that the resulting executable code runs on a Java virtual machine. Scala provides language interoperability with Java, so that libraries written in both languages may be referenced directly in Scala or Java code. Like Java, Scala is object-oriented, and uses a curly-brace syntax reminiscent of the C programming language. Unlike Java, Scala has many features of functional programming languages like Scheme, Standard ML and Haskell, including currying, type inference, immutability, lazy evaluation, and pattern matching. It also has an advanced type system supporting algebraic data types, covariance and contravariance, higher-order types (but not higher-rank types), and anonymous types. Other features of Scala not present in Java include operator overloading, optional parameters, named parameters, and raw strings. Conversely, a feature of Java not in Scala is checked exceptions, which have proved controversial.

The name Scala is a portmanteau of scalable and language, signifying that it is designed to grow with the demands of its users.

Apache Groovy is an object-oriented programming language for the Java platform. It is a dynamic language with features similar to those of Python, Ruby, Perl, and Smalltalk. It can be used as a scripting language for the Java Platform, is dynamically compiled to Java virtual machine (JVM) bytecode, and interoperates with other Java code and libraries. Groovy uses a Java-like curly-bracket syntax. Most Java code is also syntactically valid Groovy, although semantics may be different.

Object-oriented, imperative, scripting

C# (pronounced as see sharp) is a multi-paradigm programming language encompassing strong typing, imperative, declarative, functional, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming disciplines. It was developed by Microsoft within its .NET initiative and later approved as a standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) and ISO (ISO/IEC 23270:2006). C# is one of the programming languages designed for the Common Language Infrastructure.

Structured, imperative, object-oriented, event-driven, task-driven, functional, generic, reflective, concurrent

ActionScript is an object-oriented programming language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. (later acquired by Adobe Systems). It is a derivation of HyperTalk, the scripting language for HyperCard. It is now a dialect of ECMAScript (meaning it is a superset of the syntax and semantics of the language more widely known as JavaScript), though it originally arose as a sibling, both being influenced by HyperTalk.

ActionScript is used primarily for the development of websites and software targeting the Adobe Flash Player platform, used on Web pages in the form of embedded SWF files.

Elixir is a functional, concurrent, general-purpose programming language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM). Elixir builds on top of Erlang and shares the same abstractions for building distributed, fault-tolerant applications. Elixir also provides a productive tooling and an extensible design. The latter is supported by compile-time metaprogramming with macros and polymorphism via protocols.

The D programming language is an object-oriented, imperative, multi-paradigm system programming language created by Walter Bright of Digital Mars and released in 2001. Bright was joined in the design and development effort in 2007 by Andrei Alexandrescu. Though it originated as a re-engineering of C++, D is a distinct language, having redesigned some core C++ features while also taking inspiration from other languages, notably Java, Python, Ruby, C#, and Eiffel.

D's design goals attempt to combine the performance and safety of compiled languages with the expressive power of modern dynamic languages. Idiomatic D code is commonly as fast as equivalent C++ code, while being shorter and memory-safe.

compiled, multi-paradigm: procedural, object-oriented, functional, generic, concurrent

Rebol is a cross-platform data exchange language and a multi-paradigm dynamic programming language designed by Carl Sassenrath for network communications and distributed computing. It introduces the concept of dialecting: small, optimized, domain-specific languages for code and data, which is also the most notable property of the language.

PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, the PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the recursive backronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP code may be embedded into HTML code, or it can be used in combination with various web template systems, web content management system and web frameworks. PHP code is usually processed by a PHP interpreter implemented as a module in the web server or as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable. The web server combines the results of the interpreted and executed PHP code, which may be any type of data, including images, with the generated web page. PHP code may also be executed with a command-line interface (CLI) and can be used to implement standalone graphical applications.

JavaScript, often abbreviated as JS, is a high-level, dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based, multi-paradigm, and interpreted programming language. Alongside HTML and CSS, JavaScript is one of the three core technologies of World Wide Web content production. It is used to make webpages interactive and provide online programs, including video games. The majority of websites employ it, and all modern web browsers support it without the need for plug-ins by means of a built-in JavaScript engine. Each of the many JavaScript engines represent a different implementation of JavaScript, all based on the ECMAScript specification, with some engines not supporting the spec fully, and with many engines supporting additional features beyond ECMA.

As a multi-paradigm language, JavaScript supports event-driven, functional, and imperative (including object-oriented and prototype-based) programming styles. It has an API for working with text, arrays, dates, regular expressions, and basic manipulation of the DOM, but the language itself does not include any I/O, such as networking, storage, or graphics facilities, relying for these upon the host environment in which it is embedded.

Java is a general-purpose computer programming language that is concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, and specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers "write once, run anywhere" (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture. As of 2016, Java is one of the most popular programming languages in use, particularly for client-server web applications, with a reported 9 million developers. Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems (which has since been acquired by Oracle Corporation) and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++, but it has fewer low-level facilities than either of them.

Embarcadero Delphi is an integrated development environment (IDE) for desktop, mobile, web, and console applications. It's also an event driven language. Delphi's compilers use their own Object Pascal dialect of Pascal and generate native code for several platforms: Windows (x86 and x64), OS X (32-bit only), iOS (32 and 64-bit), Android and Linux (64-bit Intel).

Delphi, part of RAD Studio, includes a code editor with Code Insight (code completion), Error Insight (real-time error-checking), and other features; refactoring; a visual forms designer for both VCL (native Windows) and FMX (cross-platform, partially native per platform); an integrated debugger for all platforms including mobile; source control (SVN, git, and Mercurial); and support for third-party plugins. It has strong database support. It is not unusual for a Delphi project of a million lines to compile in a few seconds – one benchmark gave 170,000 lines per second. It is under active development, with (in 2016) releases every six months, with new platforms being added approximately every second release.

Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, and object-oriented high-level computer programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages. It has built-in language support for design-by-contract, extremely strong typing, explicit concurrency, offering tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and non-determinism. Ada improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favor of runtime errors. Ada is an international standard; the current version (known as Ada 2012) is defined by ISO/IEC 8652:2012.

Ada was originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede over 450 programming languages used by the DoD at that time. Ada was named after Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who has been credited with being the first computer programmer.

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented, general-purpose programming language. It was designed and developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan.

According to its creator, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including functional, object-oriented, and imperative. It also has a dynamic type system and automatic memory management.

R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics that is supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Polls, surveys of data miners, and studies of scholarly literature databases show that R's popularity has increased substantially in recent years.

Lua (/ˈluːə/ LOO-ə, from Portuguese: lua meaning moon) is a lightweight, multi-paradigm programming language designed primarily for embedded systems and clients. Lua is cross-platform, since the interpreter is written in ANSI C, and has a relatively simple C API.

Lua was originally designed in 1993 as a language for extending software applications to meet the increasing demand for customization at the time. It provided the basic facilities of most procedural programming languages, but more complicated or domain-specific features were not included; rather, it included mechanisms for extending the language, allowing programmers to implement such features. As Lua was intended to be a general embeddable extension language, the designers of Lua focused on improving its speed, portability, extensibility, and ease-of-use in development.

Python is a widely used high-level programming language for general-purpose programming, created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991. An interpreted language, Python has a design philosophy that emphasizes code readability (notably using whitespace indentation to delimit code blocks rather than curly brackets or keywords), and a syntax that allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than might be used in languages such as C++ or Java. It provides constructs that enable clear programming on both small and large scales.

Python features a dynamic type system and automatic memory management. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including object-oriented, imperative, functional and procedural, and has a large and comprehensive standard library.

Visual Basic is a third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft for its Component Object Model (COM) programming model first released in 1991 and declared legacy during 2008. Microsoft intended Visual Basic to be relatively easy to learn and use. Visual Basic was derived from BASIC, a user-friendly programming language designed for beginners, and it enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects.

Haskell is a standardized, general-purpose purely functional programming language, with non-strict semantics and strong static typing. It is named after logician Haskell Curry. The latest standard of Haskell is Haskell 2010. As of May 2016, a group is working on the next version, Haskell 2020.

Haskell features a type system with type inference and lazy evaluation. Type classes first appeared in the Haskell programming language. Its main implementation is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.

FL (short for Function Level) is a programming language created at the IBM Almaden Research Center by John Backus, John Williams, and Edward Wimmers in 1989.

FL was designed as a successor of Backus' earlier FP language, providing specific support for what Backus termed function-level programming.

FL is a dynamically typed strict functional programming language with throw and catch exception semantics much like in ML. Each function has an implicit history argument which is used for doing things like strictly functional input/output (I/O), but is also used for linking to C code. For doing optimization, there exists a type-system which is an extension of Hindley–Milner type inference.

Many of the language’s innovative, arguably important ideas have now been implemented in Kenneth E. Iverson’s J language.

The Wolfram Language is a general multi-paradigm programming language developed by Wolfram Research and is the programming language of the mathematical symbolic computation program Mathematica and the Wolfram Programming Cloud. It emphasizes symbolic computation, functional programming, and rule-based programming and can employ arbitrary structures and data.

It includes built-in functions for generating and running Turing machines, creating graphics and audio, analyzing 3D models, matrix manipulations, and solving differential equations. It is extensively documented.

Tcl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. It was designed with the goal of being very simple but powerful. Tcl casts everything into the mold of a command, even programming constructs like variable assignment and procedure definition. Tcl supports multiple programming paradigms, including object-oriented, imperative and functional programming or procedural styles.

It is commonly used embedded into C applications, for rapid prototyping, scripted applications, GUIs, and testing. Tcl interpreters are available for many operating systems, allowing Tcl code to run on a wide variety of systems. Because Tcl is a very compact language, it is used on embedded systems platforms, both in its full form and in several other small-footprint versions.

The popular combination of Tcl with the Tk extension is referred to as Tcl/Tk, and enables building a graphical user interface (GUI) natively in Tcl. Tcl/Tk is included in the standard Python installation in the form of Tkinter.

Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. The languages in this family include Perl 5 and Perl 6.

Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions. Perl 6, which began as a redesign of Perl 5 in 2000, eventually evolved into a separate language. Both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams and liberally borrow ideas from one another.

The Perl languages borrow features from other programming languages including C, shell script (sh), AWK, and sed. They provide powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix commandline tools, facilitating easy manipulation of text files. Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its then unsurpassed regular expression and string parsing abilities.

Erlang (/ˈɜːrlæŋ/ ER-lang) is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional programming language, as well as a garbage-collected runtime system.

The term Erlang is used interchangeably with Erlang/OTP, or OTP, which consists of the Erlang runtime system, a number of ready-to-use components mainly written in Erlang, and a set of design principles for Erlang programs.

The Erlang runtime system is known for its designs that are well suited for systems with the following characteristics: Distributed Fault-tolerant Soft real-time, Highly available, non-stop applications Hot swapping, where code can be changed without stopping a system.

The Erlang programming language is known for the following properties: Immutable data, Pattern matching, Functional programming, The sequential subset of the Erlang language supports eager evaluation, single assignment, and dynamic typing.

Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW):3 is a system-design platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments.

The graphical language is named "G"; not to be confused with G-code. Originally released for the Apple Macintosh in 1986, LabVIEW is commonly used for data acquisition, instrument control, and industrial automation on a variety of operating systems (OSs), including Microsoft Windows, various versions of Unix, Linux, and macOS.

Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. It was the main programming language used by Apple for the OS X and iOS operating systems, and their respective application programming interfaces (APIs) Cocoa and Cocoa Touch prior to the introduction of Swift.

The programming language Objective-C was originally developed in the early 1980s. It was selected as the main language used by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system, from which OS X and iOS are derived. Portable Objective-C programs that do not use the Cocoa or Cocoa Touch libraries, or those using parts that may be ported or reimplemented for other systems, can also be compiled for any system supported by GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) or Clang.

Objective-C source code 'implementation' program files usually have .m filename extensions, while Objective-C 'header/interface' files have .h extensions, the same as C header files. Objective-C++ files are denoted with a .mm file extension.

Eiffel is an object-oriented programming language designed by Bertrand Meyer (an object-orientation proponent and author of Object-Oriented Software Construction) and Eiffel Software. Meyer conceived the language in 1985 with the goal of increasing the reliability of commercial software development; the first version becoming available in 1986. In 2005, Eiffel became an ISO-standardized language.

The design of the language is closely connected with the Eiffel programming method. Both are based on a set of principles, including design by contract, command–query separation, the uniform-access principle, the single-choice principle, the open–closed principle, and option–operand separation.

Many concepts initially introduced by Eiffel later found their way into Java, C#, and other languages. New language design ideas, particularly through the Ecma/ISO standardization process, continue to be incorporated into the Eiffel language.

FoxPro was a text-based procedurally oriented programming language and database management system (DBMS), and it is also an object-oriented programming language, originally published by Fox Software and later by Microsoft, for MS-DOS, Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX. The final published release of FoxPro was 2.6. Development continued under the Visual FoxPro label, which in turn was discontinued in 2007.

FoxPro was derived from FoxBase (Fox Software, Perrysburg, Ohio), which was in turn derived from dBase III (Ashton-Tate) and dBase II. dBase II was the first commercial version of a database program written by Wayne Ratliff, called Vulcan, running on CP/M.

FoxPro is both a DBMS and a relational database management system (RDBMS), since it extensively supports multiple relationships between multiple DBF files (tables). However it lacks transactional processing.

MATLAB (matrix laboratory) is a multi-paradigm numerical computing environment. A proprietary programming language developed by MathWorks, MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, Fortran and Python.

Although MATLAB is intended primarily for numerical computing, an optional toolbox uses the MuPAD symbolic engine, allowing access to symbolic computing abilities. An additional package, Simulink, adds graphical multi-domain simulation and model-based design for dynamic and embedded systems.

Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (R2004) (formerly X3.226-1994 (R1999)). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived from the ANSI Common Lisp standard.

The Common Lisp language was developed as a standardized and improved successor of Maclisp. By the early 1980s several groups were already at work on diverse successors to MacLisp: Lisp Machine Lisp (aka ZetaLisp), Spice Lisp, NIL and S-1 Lisp. Common Lisp sought to unify, standardise, and extend the features of these MacLisp dialects. Common Lisp is not an implementation, but rather a language specification. Several implementations of the Common Lisp standard are available, including free and open-source software and proprietary products. Common Lisp is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language. It supports a combination of procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming paradigms. As a dynamic programming language, it facilitates evolutionary and incremental software development, with iterative compilation into efficient run-time programs. This incremental development is often done interactively without interrupting the running application.

Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, and object-oriented high-level computer programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages. It has built-in language support for design-by-contract, extremely strong typing, explicit concurrency, offering tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and non-determinism. Ada improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favor of runtime errors. Ada is an international standard; the current version (known as Ada 2012) is defined by ISO/IEC 8652:2012.

Ada was originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede over 450 programming languages used by the DoD at that time. Ada was named after Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who has been credited with being the first computer programmer.

C++ (pronounced /ˌsiːˌplʌsˈplʌs/ "cee plus plus") is a general-purpose programming language. It has imperative, object-oriented and generic programming features, while also providing facilities for low-level memory manipulation.

It was designed with a bias toward system programming and embedded, resource-constrained and large systems, with performance, efficiency and flexibility of use as its design highlights. C++ has also been found useful in many other contexts, with key strengths being software infrastructure and resource-constrained applications, including desktop applications, servers (e.g. e-commerce, web search or SQL servers), and performance-critical applications (e.g. telephone switches or space probes). C++ is a compiled language, with implementations of it available on many platforms. Many vendors provide C++ compilers, including the Free Software Foundation, Microsoft, Intel, and IBM.

C++ is standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), with the latest standard version ratified and published by ISO in December 2017 as ISO/IEC 14882:2017 (informally known as C++17). The C++ programming language was initially standardized in 1998 as ISO/IEC 14882:1998, which was then amended by the C++03, C++11 and C++14 standards. The current C++17 standard supersedes these with new features and an enlarged standard library. Before the initial standardization in 1998, C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs since 1979, as an extension of the C language as he wanted an efficient and flexible language similar to C, which also provided high-level features for program organization. C++20 is the next planned standard thereafter.

Many other programming languages have been influenced by C++, including C#, D, Java, and newer versions of C.

SQL (/ˌɛs.kjuːˈɛl/ (About this sound listen) ESS-kew-EL or /ˈsiːkwəl/ (About this sound listen) SEE-kwəl Structured Query Language) is a domain-specific language used in programming and designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS), or for stream processing in a relational data stream management system (RDSMS). In comparison to older read/write APIs like ISAM or VSAM, SQL offers two main advantages: first, it introduced the concept of accessing many records with one single command; and second, it eliminates the need to specify how to reach a record, e.g. with or without an index.

Originally based upon relational algebra and tuple relational calculus, SQL consists of many types of statements, which may be informally classed as sublanguages, commonly: a data query language (DQL), a data definition language (DDL), a data control language (DCL), and a data manipulation language (DML). The scope of SQL includes data query, data manipulation (insert, update and delete), data definition (schema creation and modification), and data access control. Although SQL is often described as, and to a great extent is, a declarative language (4GL), it also includes procedural elements.

SQL was one of the first commercial languages for Edgar F. Codd's relational model, as described in his influential 1970 paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". Despite not entirely adhering to the relational model as described by Codd, it became the most widely used database language.

SQL became a standard of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1986, and of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1987. Since then, the standard has been revised to include a larger set of features. Despite the existence of such standards, most SQL code is not completely portable among different database systems without adjustments.

• A better, conceptually uniform successor of Pascal.
• Mechanisms to program concurrency (many processes running in parallel).
• Not used as much as it deserves.
• Its successors, Modula-3 and Oberon, are even more conceptually appealing, practically useful—and almost not used at all. (They lost the popularity contest with C++.)

Scheme is a functional programming language and one of the two main dialects of the programming language Lisp. Unlike Common Lisp, the other main dialect, Scheme follows a minimalist design philosophy specifying a small standard core with powerful tools for language extension.

Scheme was created during the 1970s at the MIT AI Lab and released by its developers, Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman, via a series of memos now known as the Lambda Papers. It was the first dialect of Lisp to choose lexical scope and the first to require implementations to perform tail-call optimization, giving stronger support for functional programming and associated techniques such as recursive algorithms. It was also one of the first programming languages to support first-class continuations. It had a significant influence on the effort that led to the development of Common Lisp.

The Scheme language is standardized in the official IEEE standard and a de facto standard called the Revisedn Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (RnRS). The most widely implemented standard is R5RS (1998); a new standard, R6RS, was ratified in 2007. Scheme has a diverse user base due to its compactness and elegance, but its minimalist philosophy has also caused wide divergence between practical implementations, so much that the Scheme Steering Committee calls it "the world's most unportable programming language" and "a family of dialects" rather than a single language.

ML ('Meta Language') is a general-purpose functional programming language. It has roots in Lisp, and has been characterized as "Lisp with types". It is known for its use of the polymorphic Hindley–Milner type system, which automatically assigns the types of most expressions without requiring explicit type annotations, and ensures type safety – there is a formal proof that a well-typed ML program does not cause runtime type errors. ML provides pattern matching for function arguments, garbage collection, imperative programming, call-by-value and currying. It is used heavily in programming language research and is one of the few languages to be completely specified and verified using formal semantics. Its types and pattern matching make it well-suited and commonly used to operate on other formal languages, such as in compiler writing, automated theorem proving and formal verification.

C (/siː/, as in the letter c) is a general-purpose, imperative computer programming language, supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope and recursion, while a static type system prevents many unintended operations. By design, C provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and therefore it has found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language, including operating systems, as well as various application software for computers ranging from supercomputers to embedded systems.

C was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs, and used to re-implement the Unix operating system. It has since become one of the most widely used programming languages of all time, with C compilers from various vendors available for the majority of existing computer architectures and operating systems. C has been standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) since 1989 (see ANSI C) and subsequently by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

C is an imperative procedural language. It was designed to be compiled using a relatively straightforward compiler, to provide low-level access to memory, to provide language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions, and to require minimal run-time support. Despite its low-level capabilities, the language was designed to encourage cross-platform programming. A standards-compliant and portably written C program can be compiled for a very wide variety of computer platforms and operating systems with few changes to its source code. The language has become available on a very wide range of platforms, from embedded microcontrollers to supercomputers.

Prolog is a general-purpose logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.

Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended as primarily a declarative programming language: the program logic is expressed in terms of relations, represented as facts and rules. A computation is initiated by running a query over these relations.

The language was first conceived by a group around Alain Colmerauer in Marseille, France, in the early 1970s and the first Prolog system was developed in 1972 by Colmerauer with Philippe Roussel.

Prolog was one of the first logic programming languages, and remains the most popular among such languages today, with several free and commercial implementations available. The language has been used for theorem proving, expert systems, term rewriting, type inference, and automated planning, as well as its original intended field of use, natural language processing. Modern Prolog environments support the creation of graphical user interfaces, as well as administrative and networked applications.

Prolog is well-suited for specific tasks that benefit from rule-based logical queries such as searching databases, voice control systems, and filling templates.

• Alan Kay / Xerox PARC / 1972,
• Inspired by Simula, Sketchpad, Logo, cellular biology, etc.;
• Smalltalk is more object-oriented than most of its more popular descendants;
• Everything is an object: variables, constants, activation records, classes, etc.;
• All computation is performed by objects sending and receiving messages: 1+2*3;

Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Scott Wallace, and others during the 1970s.

The language was first generally released as Smalltalk-80. Smalltalk-like languages are in continuing active development and have gathered loyal communities of users around them. ANSI Smalltalk was ratified in 1998 and represents the standard version of Smalltalk.

• A conceptually simplified and cleaned-up successor of Algol 60.
• A great language for teaching structured programming.
• An excellent first language to learn: teaches good programming habits.
• Its later extensions (for example, Delphi) are full-fledged systems programming packages, as powerful as any Java kit.

Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, which Niklaus Wirth designed in 1968–69 and published in 1970, as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named in honor of the French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal.

Pascal was developed on the pattern of the ALGOL 60 language. Wirth had already developed several improvements to this language as part of the ALGOL X proposals, but these were not accepted and Pascal was developed separately and released in 1970. A derivative known as Object Pascal designed for object-oriented programming was developed in 1985; this was used by Apple Computer and Borland in the late 1980s and later developed into Delphi on the Microsoft Windows platform. Extensions to the Pascal concepts led to the Pascal-like languages Modula-2 and Oberon.

Forth is an imperative stack-based computer programming language and environment originally designed by Charles "Chuck" Moore. Language features include structured programming, reflection (the ability to modify the program structure during program execution), concatenative programming (functions are composed with juxtaposition) and extensibility (the programmer can create new commands). Although not an acronym, the language's name is sometimes spelled with all capital letters as FORTH, following the customary usage during its earlier years.

A procedural programming language without type checking, Forth features both interactive execution of commands (making it suitable as a shell for systems that lack a more formal operating system) and the ability to compile sequences of commands for later execution. Some Forth implementations (usually early versions or those written to be extremely portable) compile threaded code, but many implementations today generate optimized machine code like other language compilers.

B is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969. It is the work of Ken Thompson with Dennis Ritchie.

B was derived from BCPL, and its name may be a contraction of BCPL. Thompson's coworker Dennis Ritchie speculated that the name might be based on Bon, an earlier, but unrelated, programming language that Thompson designed for use on Multics.

B was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications, such as system and language software.

Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. "Logo" is not an acronym. It was derived from the Greek logos meaning word or "thought" by Feurzeig, to distinguish itself from other programming languages that were primarily numbers, not graphics or logic, oriented.

A general-purpose language, Logo is widely known for its use of turtle graphics, in which commands for movement and drawing produced line graphics either on screen or with a small robot called a turtle. The language was conceived to teach concepts of programming related to Lisp and only later to enable what Papert called "body-syntonic reasoning", where students could understand, predict and reason about the turtle's motion by imagining what they would do if they were the turtle. There are substantial differences among the many dialects of Logo, and the situation is confused by the regular appearance of turtle-graphics programs that call themselves Logo.

Logo is a multi-paradigm adaptation and dialect of Lisp, a functional programming language. There is no standard Logo, but UCBLogo has the best facilities for handling lists, files, I/O, and recursion in scripts, and can be used to teach all computer science concepts, as UC Berkeley lecturer Brian Harvey did in his Computer Science Logo Style trilogy.

Logo is usually an interpreted language, although there have been developed compiled Logo dialects (such as Lhogho and Liogo). Logo is not case-sensitive but retains the case used for formatting.

BCPL ("Basic Combined Programming Language"; or 'Before C Programming Language' (a common humorous backronym) ) is a procedural, imperative, and structured computer programming language. Originally intended for writing compilers for other languages, BCPL is no longer in common use. However, its influence is still felt because a stripped down and syntactically changed version of BCPL, called B, was the language on which the C programming language was based. BCPL introduced several features of modern programming languages, including using curly braces to delimit code blocks; compilation via virtual machine byte code; and the world's first 'hello world' demonstrator program.

JOSS (an acronym for JOHNNIAC Open Shop System) was one of the very first interactive, time-sharing programming languages. JOSS I, developed by J. Clifford Shaw at RAND was first implemented, in beta form, on the JOHNNIAC computer in May 1963. The full implementation was deployed in January 1964, supporting five terminals and the final version, supporting ten terminals, was deployed in January 1965.

JOSS was written in a symbolic assembly language called EasyFox (E and F in the US military's phonetic alphabet of that time). EasyFox was also developed by Cliff Shaw.

• The first in history language of personal computing.
• The first programming language for many programmers: designed to be easy to learn.
• Very simple, limited, though still general-purpose.
• Present-day versions of Basic are full-fledged languages—not "basic", and not easy to learn any more.

BASIC (an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use. In 1964, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original BASIC language at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, United States. They wanted to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn.

Versions of BASIC became widespread on microcomputers in the mid-1970s and 1980s. Microcomputers usually shipped with BASIC, often in the machine's firmware. Having an easy-to-learn language on these early personal computers allowed small business owners, professionals, hobbyists, and consultants to develop custom software on computers they could afford. In the 2010s, BASIC was popular in many computing dialects and in new languages influenced by BASIC, such as Microsoft's Visual Basic.

• A combination of features believed (at the time) best in Fortran, Algol 60, Cobol.
• The first language designed to be completely general, good for all possible applications.
• Actively promoted by IBM.
• Not used much today.
• An interesting feature introduced in PL/I: event handling.

• An extension of Algol 60 designed for simulation of concurrent processes.Introduced the central concepts of object orientation: classes and encapsulation.
• Predecessor of Smalltalk and C++.
• Now unused.

Simula is the name of two simulation programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Syntactically, it is a fairly faithful superset of ALGOL 60.

APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It has also inspired several other programming languages. It is still used today for certain applications.

SNOBOL (StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language) is a series of computer programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4. It was one of a number of text-string-oriented languages developed during the 1950s and 1960s; others included COMIT and TRAC.

• Business-oriented computations, very strict program organization, poor control structures, elaborate data structures, record type introduced for the first time. Used to be very popular in business and government, much less at universities.
• Revived for a while during the Y2K scare

COBOL (/ˈkoʊbɒl/, an acronym for common business-oriented language) is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in legacy applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. But due to its declining popularity and the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, programs are being migrated to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages or replaced with software packages. Most programming in COBOL is now purely to maintain existing applications.

COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on previous programming language design work by Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as "the (grand)mother of COBOL". It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. Intended as a stopgap, the Department of Defense promptly forced computer manufacturers to provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption. It was standardized in 1968 and has since been revised four times. Expansions include support for structured and object-oriented programming. The current standard is ISO/IEC 1989:2014.

COBOL has an English-like syntax, which was designed to be self-documenting and highly readable. However, it is verbose and uses over 300 reserved words. In contrast with modern, succinct syntax like y = x;, COBOL has a more English-like syntax (in this case, MOVE x TO y). COBOL code is split into four divisions (identification, environment, data and procedure) containing a rigid hierarchy of sections, paragraphs and sentences. Lacking a large standard library, the standard specifies 43 statements, 87 functions and just one class.

Academic computer scientists were generally uninterested in business applications when COBOL was created and were not involved in its design; it was (effectively) designed from the ground up as a computer language for business, with an emphasis on inputs and outputs, whose only data types were numbers and strings of text. COBOL has been criticized throughout its life, however, for its verbosity, design process and poor support for structured programming, which resulted in monolithic and incomprehensible programs.

RPG is a high-level programming language (HLL) for business applications. RPG is an IBM proprietary programming language and its later versions are available only on IBM i- or OS/400-based systems.

It has a long history, having been developed by IBM in 1959 as the Report Program Generator - a tool to replicate punched card processing on the IBM 1401 then updated to RPG II for the IBM System/3 in the late 1960s, and since evolved into an HLL equivalent to COBOL and PL/I.

It remains a popular programming language on the IBM i operating system, which runs on IBM Power i platform hardware. The current version, RPG IV (a.k.a. ILE RPG), provides a modern programming environment.

FACT is an early discontinued computer programming language, created by the Datamatic Division of Minneapolis Honeywell for its model 800 series business computers in 1959. FACT was an acronym for "Fully Automated Compiling Technique". It was an influence on the design of the COBOL programming language.

Some of the design of FACT was based on the linguistic project Basic English, developed about 1925 by C.K. Ogden.

The software was actually designed by Computer Sciences Corporation (Fletcher Jones, Roy Nutt, and Robert L. Patrick) under contract to Richard Clippinger of Honeywell.

Lisp (historically, LISP) is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today. Only Fortran is older, by one year. Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp and Scheme.

• It was the first to have block structure, recursion, and a formal definition. It is not used now, but it is the ancestor of most contemporary languages.
• As far as design goes, Algol 60 was one of the most important innovation in the history of programming languages.

ALGOL 58, originally known as IAL, is one of the family of ALGOL computer programming languages. It was an early compromise design soon superseded by ALGOL 60.

• Fortran was the first effectively implemented high-level language that introduced variables as we know them now, loops, procedures, statement labels and much more.
• The earliest versions of Fortran had many unique features, often awkward, later kept along for compatibility. It is still widely used in engineering applications that require much array manipulation.
• The newest version, Fortran 90, has converged toward other popular programming languages.

Fortran (/ˈfɔːrtræn/; formerly FORTRAN, derived from Formula Translation) is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continuous use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry. It is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.

Fortran encompasses a lineage of versions, each of which evolved to add extensions to the language while usually retaining compatibility with prior versions. Successive versions have added support for structured programming and processing of character-based data (FORTRAN 77), array programming, modular programming and generic programming (Fortran 90), high performance Fortran (Fortran 95), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003) and concurrent programming (Fortran 2008).

FLOW-MATIC, originally known as B-0 (Business Language version 0), was the first English-like data processing language. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand under Grace Hopper during the period from 1955 until 1959. It had a strong influence on the development of COBOL.

Information Processing Language (IPL) is a programming language created by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert A. Simon at RAND Corporation and the Carnegie Institute of Technology at about 1956. Newell had the job of language specifier-application programmer, Shaw was the system programmer, and Simon took the job of application programmer-user.

The language includes features intended to help with programs that perform simple problem solving actions such as lists, dynamic memory allocation, data types, recursion, functions as arguments, generators, and cooperative multitasking. IPL invented the concept of list processing, albeit in an assembly-language style.

• Those are machine languages and assembly languages, machine-dependent coding systems. They were initially fully binary, and then symbolic.
• There is one native machine language, and usually one assembly language per processor model.