After ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language) was released in 1958 and 1960, it became the standard in computing literature for describing algorithms. Although its commercial success was limited, most popular imperative languages—including C, Pascal, Ada, C++, Java, and C#—are directly or indirectly descended from ALGOL 60.

• Among its innovations adopted by later programming languages included greater portability and the first use of context-free, BNF grammar.
• Simula, the first language to support object-oriented programming (including subtypes, dynamic dispatch, and inheritance), also descends from ALGOL and achieved commercial success.
• C, another ALGOL descendant, has sustained popularity into the twenty-first century.

C allows access to lower-level machine operations more than other contemporary languages. Its power and efficiency, generated in part with flexible pointer operations, comes at the cost of making it more difficult to write correct code.

Prolog, designed in 1972, was the first logic programming language, communicating with a computer using formal logic notation. With logic programming, the programmer specifies a desired result and allows the interpreter to decide how to achieve it.