The MeasureIT Match Game Answers
A Who's Who of Programming Languages
June 1, 2003
by Rick Ralston

1. Awk

   A utility language of choice for small UNIX data transformation and parsing programs.

2. Python

   An interpreted, object-oriented language. It is intended to be highly effective, easy to use, and extensible.

3. Smalltalk

   A dynamic object-oriented language originally designed as an experiment in the 1970s that became widely used.

4. Perl

   An interpreted scripting language with extensive facilities for data manipulation and rapid application development.

5. Logo

   A functional language designed teach programming and problem-solving principles to children.

6. Euphoria

   Euphoria is an interpreted block-structured language for PCs.

7. Theta

   An object-oriented language with a sophisticated and flexible type system, developed by the MIT Programming Methodology Group.

8. ABAP

   Language used for SAP programming.

9. Ada

   A block-structured language with many object-oriented programming features. It was originally designed for the US Dept. of Defense, and was intended to support large-scale programming and promote software reliability.

10. Visual Basic

    An advanced structured dialect of Basic developed by Microsoft.

11. FORTRAN

    FORmula TRANSlation is one of the oldest programming languages, originally developed in the late 1950s, and is still popular even today.

12. Rexx

    A block-sturctured procedural language commonly used for application development, integration, and extension.

13. Algol

    A very early block-structured compiled language developed a committee, and implemented by computing pioneer John Backus..

14. RPG

    A high-level database access and text generation language invented for mainframe MIS environments.

15. Lisp

    An extremely rich and powerful interpreted programming language that has enjoyed continuous use and popularity since the mid-1960s.

16. Limbo

    The main programming language of the Lucent Inferno operating system.

17. Prolog

    A language for PROgramming in LOGic and was a progenitor of the study of 'logic programming.'

18. INTERCAL

    A compiled language deliberately designed to be convoluted, difficult to program, difficult to read, unlike all other languages, and yet still computationally complete.

19. HyperTalk

    The scripting language for Apple's information presentation system HyperCard.

20. C

    Renowned as the language of the UNIX operating system, but in fact is widely used in PC, Mac, mainframe, and other computing environments.

21. MUMPS

    A procedural, interpreted language with extensive features for event-driven programming, text handling, and database manipulation.

22. SNOBOL

    A very powerful but eccentric programming language primarily oriented towards string data handling.

23. BLISS

    A low-level procedural language developed and used by Digital Equipment Corp. for system programming..

24. SAS

    Statistical analysis programming language.

25. BASIC

    Designed by two graduate students at Dartmouth to be an easy first language for programming neophytes.

26. Forth

    An interpreted stack-based language with a very simple syntax and elegant abstract exection model.

27. Obliq

    An object-oriented interpreted scripting language that supports distributed multi-threaded computation..

28. Turing

    A structured programming language, used mainly in high schools, designed for teaching computing principles and for simple graphics.

29. COBOL

    In continuous widespread use since the early 1960s, designed to meet the needs of banks, manufacturers, bureaucracies, and other big organizations with data handling and report generation requirements.

30. Dylan

    A dynamic object-oriented language with both procedural and functional features, developed by Apple Computer in the mid-1990s.

31. Java

    A simple, portable object-oriented language designed by research staff at Sun Microsystems.

32. APL

    An interpreted mathematical language characterized by its terse syntax and bizarre non-ASCII character set.

33. JavaScript

    A loosely typed scripting language with object-oriented and block-structuring features, invented by Netscape Communications for adding dynamic behavior to web pages.

34. Terse

    Invented to simplify low-level programming on the Intel x86 line of microprocessors.

35. Pascal

    A simple block-structured language originally designed for computer science education, made popular by Borland..