Most Popular Programming Languages 1958 - 2025
Welcome to Alternative Data — in this video, we travel from 1958 to 2025 to explore how the world’s most popular programming languages evolved over nearly seven decades.
From the birth of early computer science to the rise of AI and cloud engineering, this timeline shows how each era shaped the tools developers rely on today.
In the early decades, classics like FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL, and Lisp laid the foundation of modern computing.
The 1970s and 80s brought pivotal languages like C, Pascal, BASIC, and Ada, defining how software was written for generations.
The explosion of the internet in the 1990s pushed C++, Java, PHP, and JavaScript into the spotlight.
By the 2000s and 2010s, Python, JavaScript, C#, and R dominated web, mobile, and data applications—fueling everything from social media to machine learning.
As we approach 2025, languages like Go, Kotlin, TypeScript, and Rust continue to grow, reshaping the future of software development with speed, safety, and scalability.
This bar chart race visualizes how technology, industry trends, and global innovation shaped the evolution of programming languages over time.
⛲ Sources:
▫️ TIOBE Index
▫️ Stack Overflow Trends
▫️ Historical computer science archives
💻 Video Editing:
▫️ Camtasia
🖼️ Thumbnail:
▫️ Photoshop
Programming languages featured in this video:
Assembly
APL
Fortran
Autocode
COBOL
IPL
ALGOL
Pascal
FLOW-MATIC
Lisp
BASIC
C
Ada
C++
Visual Basic
Java
Perl
JavaScript
Delphi
PHP
C#
Python
Ruby
Objective-C
Matlab
R
Swift
TypeScript
Go
Rust