It’s amazing and surprising how long some computer languages have actually been around. Beginning way back in 1957 with Fortran, which is still in use at the National Weather Service and moving to Cobol in 1959, which is used by the united States Postal Service.
The graphic below is courtesy of Rack Space. It cover the history of the most popular programming languages from the aforementioned Fortran and Cobol right up through Ruby on Rails. It also give a very brief bit of information about each and some information about who has implemented them. At the bottom, you will find a chart that illustrates the popularity of each language. It’s a fascinating snapshot that I found a few surprises in. Did you know Skype was written in Pascal? Or, that C++ is the most popular programming language ever? Or, that PHP (the backbone of many web 2.0 sites) has been around since 1995? It’s all in the infographic below.
