If you think that programming languages are all created by men, then you are wrong. It is true that men dominate the software industries and come up with new programming languages now and then. Despite coding being a male-dominated world, some women who have created their programming languages and have carved out a unique niche for themselves will amaze you. In other words, they do have some amount of contribution to these programming languages.
Nevertheless, programming is one of the areas in the software industries where women have left their mark. Women were the pioneers of many programming languages that have had a huge impact and have lasted longer in the software industries.
Top 5 Programming Languages Created By Women
Let’s take a look at the top 5 programming languages that women have created, and that continue to play a major role in the coding world even today, without further discussion.
1. ARC Assembly – Kathleen Booth
Kathleen Booth was the first lady who came up with the assembly language known as ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator) in 1950. To deal with programming languages, one had to write entirely in machine code as the computer would not understand anything apart from a series of 0s and 1s.
To make programming languages easier, assembly language was created. In other words, it provided a much more reliable platform where programmers could write machine instructions in mnemonic form.
In this type of programming language, the assembler holds the responsibility to translate it into machine code.
2. COBOL – Grace Hopper
Nine years after the development of two well-known programming languages, COBOL came into the market in 1959. The main mind behind this language is Grace Hopper. However, a lot of credit goes to the team whose support has helped the COBOL language run on different computers, specifically aiding non-technical people in dealing with COBOL.
Hopper, upon working with the Univac system, came up with creating the COBOL programming language. Besides that, she is also acknowledged for creating the world’s first compiler, A-0.
Another high-level programming language like ARITH-MATIC also goes to her credit. She is widely appreciated for creating B-0, which is known as FLOW-MATIC. It is a business application for understanding English keywords easily.
3. FORMAC – Jean E. Sammet
In 1962, Jean E. Sammet came up with the design of another programming language named FORMAC, known to be an extension of FORTRAN. FORTRAN was ultimately developed by IBM to handle mathematical and scientific computations easily.
Jean E. Sammet holds the credit for designing this programming language at IBM in 1962. The language was the first widely used language for symbolic mathematical computation.
4. Logo – Cynthia Solomon
In 1967, another programming language that was a massive hit among junior programmers was LOGO. Edited by Cynthia Solomon and her team, the programming language was an absolute wonder for kids.
Despite the concept of numbers and symbols in the programming language, Cynthia Solomon introduced something unique: she based the language entirely on words and sentences that could be understood by kids.
Also, being a student of a computer science background, Cynthia holds the credit for developing this language called Logo. One of the widely appreciated applications of the Logo language was Turtle Robots. In this application, users could write codes to draw geometric shapes on the screen.
5. CLU – Barbara Liskov
CLU was a programming language that entered the market in 1974. The programming language was based on object-oriented programming and gave a boost to this concept as well.
The development of the CLU language took place at MIT by Barbara Liskov. She was the first woman in the US who hold the credit for a PhD in computer science.
During her research career, she also contributed some significant concepts in the programming field like abstract data, iterators, etc., which are still in use.
