6 Programming Languages That Are Created by Women

In today’s developing world women are capable of doing everything but are not given as much recognition as men. Talking about the software industry, it is often considered male-oriented, though women have also contributed a lot. Most of you might also know that the first computer programmer was a woman. Hence, thinking programming is a male-dominated field then it is wrong because there are many female programmers who have done some tremendous jobs and given some amazing programming languages. 

They have left their mark in this field making a long-lasting contribution. So, in this post, let’s take a look at 6 significant programming languages that are created by women. 

1. COBOL – Grace Hopper

Created by Grace Hopper in the year 1959, COBOL refers to a common business-oriented language. Grace was a Rear Admiral in the US navy and she along with the other members of the Conference on Data Systems Languages Records developed this language. She mainly created COBOL as an easy and understandable language, which could be used by all. It is one of the oldest programming languages that was adapted instantly for doing business tasks around the world. 

Furthermore, Grace Hopper in order to help the business applications, for easing down the English keywords credited by creating B-0 in the year 1959. Hence, being called the mother of COBOL. Apart from this, she also created the world’s first compiler, called the A-0 along with ARITH-MATIC, which was a very high-level programming language. 

People are allergic to change. They like to say, “We’ve always worked this way.” I’m trying to fight it. That’s why I have a watch on the wall whose hands are going in the opposite direction.  – Grace Hopper

2. ARC Assembly – Kathleen Booth

One of the oldest programming languages ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator) Assembly was created by Kathleen Booth in the year 1950 while working at the Birkbeck College in the UK. 

During these times the machine languages were written in a series of 0s and 1s and the assembly language came out to be the reliable one. Kathleen developed this language to make computer programs easier and help programmers to write machine instructions in mnemonic form. While working in the program the language provides all the responsibility to the assembler to translate it properly into the machine. 

Besides this, Kathleen and her team also worked on several programming languages, such as the APE(X)C (All-purpose Electronic (Rayon) Computer), the SEC (Simple Electronic Computer), etc., and all these were considered to be remarkable achievements by the team as they created these languages with minimum resources. 

3. CLU – Barbara Liskov

Developed by Barbara Liskov in the year 1974, CLU came out to be an important programming language and an evolutionary step. The development of CLU was done at MIT, as a small step toward object-oriented programming languages, which helped in providing linguistic support for data abstraction. 

Although this language lacked many features, especially the OO feature, it still influenced many modern-day languages including Python, JAVA, and C++. 

Liskov was the first woman in the US to hold a Ph.D. degree in computer science and introduced the world to the concept of iterators, abstract data types, parallel tasks, etc. She also won the 2008 A.M. Turing Award, considered the highest honor in computer science for her amazing work in designing computer programming languages. 

4. BBC BASIC – Sophie Wilson

Created in the year 1981 by Sophie Wilson, it was the first programming language developed for a television program. This language was made for BBC so as to provide a standardized language for their television program ‘The Computer Literacy Project.’ BBC BASIC had numerous optimizations, which helped it to run programs much faster than Microsoft BASIC on the same machines. Sophie Wilson was a computer scientist who helped BCC create a new and better version of BBC BASIC under 16KB. 

Furthermore, the language also included many functions, procedures, and IF-THEN-ELSE structures. Sophie started programming at a very young age and during her first summer break in college, she developed an automated cow feeder. Followed by her next design Acorn System 1, an early 8-bit microcomputer for hobbyists. Apart from these, Sophie also co-designed a 32-bit RISC machine processor in 1985 with her colleague Steve Furber. 

Not knowing something is impossible has interesting effects on your work.  – Sophie Wilson

5. Small Talk – Adele Goldberg

Another programming language created by a woman, Small Talk was developed to help everyone, create applications. The idea behind creating Small Talk unveiled the new world of computing symbolized by “human-computer symbiosis”. 

It was created by Adele Goldberg and her team in the year 1973. She supported the team by pioneering the concepts, like the WYSIWYG editor, model-view-controller, etc. Goldberg was a computer scientist and was working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) when she created Small Talk. Besides this, she also became the president of the Association for Computing Machinery from 1984 to 1986. Adele Goldberg also wrote and co-authored many books on Smalltalk-80, which included, Smalltalk-80: The Language, Smalltalk-80: The Language & Its Implementation, and Smalltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment. 

For her commendable work, Goldberg was also awarded the ACM Software Systems Award in 1987, along with “PC” magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. She also appeared in “Forbes” magazine as “20 Who Matter”. 

6. LOGO – Cynthia Solomon

One of the easiest programming languages created for kids, LOGO was primarily based on words and sentences. Created by Cynthia Solomon and her team, this language does not comprise numbers and symbols. It was a unique idea because no one till now used any graphic in the programming languages, making them harder to understand. Thus, LOGO came out to be a wonder for students who were studying computer science. 

Cynthia was a researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence, educational computing, and computer science. She and her team started working on LOGO 1967 and as soon as the programming language was launched it became an instant hit among the juniors. It had many features and applications but the widest used among them was Turtle Robots as in this particular application the user can command the codes to draw geometric shapes. 

Once this app was successfully accepted by people, Cynthia later oversaw the creation of Apple’s Logo implementation. Furthermore, for her tremendous achievement, she was also awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at Constructionism 2016. 

Hence, these were the women who contributed to the development of some major programming languages which became the major part of many modern languages. These women created a major impact in the software development world and most of them are doing it till now.