| Fortran | 1957 | IBM (John Backus and team) | Scientific and engineering calculations |
| Lisp | 1958 | John McCarthy | Symbolic computation and AI research |
| COBOL | 1959 | Committee of experts (Grace Hopper) | Business data processing and commercial applications |
| ALGOL | 1958 | International Committee (Peter Naur) | Algorithmic language for scientific computation |
| BASIC | 1964 | John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz | Teaching and ease of use |
| Pascal | 1970 | Niklaus Wirth | Teaching structured programming and data structuring |
| C | 1972 | Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs | System programming and operating systems (e.g., UNIX) |
| Smalltalk | 1980 | Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, et al. | Object-oriented programming and GUI development |
| C++ | 1985 | Bjarne Stroustrup | Extension of C with object-oriented features |
| Objective-C | 1984 | Brad Cox and Tom Love | Object-oriented programming (NeXTSTEP, macOS/iOS) |
| Perl | 1987 | Larry Wall | Text processing, system administration, web development |
| Haskell | 1990 | Committee of researchers | Purely functional programming language |
| Python | 1991 | Guido van Rossum | General-purpose programming, readability and simplicity |
| Java | 1995 | James Gosling, Mike Sheridan (Sun) | Platform-independent application development |
| JavaScript | 1995 | Brendan Eich (Netscape) | Web development (client-side scripting) |
| PHP | 1995 | Rasmus Lerdorf | Server-side scripting for web development |
| Ruby | 1995 | Yukihiro Matsumoto | General-purpose programming, web development (Rails) |
| C# | 2000 | Microsoft (Anders Hejlsberg) | Windows applications and enterprise software |
| Swift | 2014 | Apple Inc. (Chris Lattner, et al.) | iOS and macOS application development |
| Kotlin | 2011 | JetBrains | Android development, interoperable with Java |
