9 programming languages and the women who created them

Software development has a well-known reputation for being a male-dominated world. But despite this, women have made many important and lasting contributions to programming throughout the decades. One area, in particular, where many women have left a mark is in the development of programming languages. Numerous pioneering women have designed and developed the languages programmers use to give computers instructions, starting in the days of mainframes and machine code, through assemblers and into higher level modern day languages. Use the arrows above to read the stories behind 9 programming languages that have had a significant impact over the years and the women who created them.

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Creator: Kathleen Booth

Year: 1950

Backstory: In early days of computer programming, programs had to be written directly in machine code, a series of 0s and 1s that the computer would interpret and act upon. Assembly language was developed to make computer programming easier and more reliable by letting programmers write machine instructions in mnemonic form that an assembler would translate into machine code. One of the very first assembly languages was created by by Kathleen Booth who was working at Birkbeck College in the U.K. The language was written for the ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator) computer, which Booth also helped to design and build.

Creator: Jean Sammet

Year: 1962

Backstory: FORTRAN was developed by IBM in the 1950s mainly for mathematical computation and scientific computing. In 1961, IBM hired mathematician Jean Sammet who had previously worked in scientific programming at Sperry Gyroscope and Sylvania and was, along with Grace Hopper, part of the group that developed COBOL. At IBM in 1962, Sammet developed the programming language FORMAC (FORmula MAnipulation Compiler), an extension of FORTRAN that was able to perform algebraic manipulations. FORMAC became the first widely used language for doing symbolic mathematical computations.

Creators: Adele Goldberg, along with Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, Scott Wallace, Peter Deutsch, and others at Xerox PARC

Year: 1980

Backstory: Much as COBOL was developed 20 years earlier to make programming easier for the everyday person, one of the main ideas behind Smalltalk was to create a language that would allow anyone, not just computer scientists, to create applications. Smalltalk was developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) under the guidance of Alan Kay, who was inspired by Simula, the world’s first object-oriented program. In 1973, Adele Goldberg joined Kay’s team at PARC and played a significant role in the development of Smalltalk and its pioneering concepts, such as a the model-view-controller (a key concept behind graphical user interfaces), a WYSIWYG editor, and an integrated development environment. In 1979 Goldberg gave Steve Jobs and his programmers a demo of Smalltalk and its GUI on a PARC Alto computer, which subsequently influenced the design of Apple’s Macintosh desktop. Smalltalk was first released outside of PARC in 1980 as Smalltalk-80 and has had a huge influence on many later languages including as Java, Objective-C, and Python.