5 Early Programming Languages That Still Power The Internet Today

Programming languages that power the internet are often a lot older than you think. While a ton of new frameworks or variations on popular languages are released regularly, major sites and most of the internet still hinge on languages that predate the world wide web in some spots. These languages are a little different from other old programming languages, like COBOL or FORTRAN (used in the making of "The Last Starfighter") in that they don't power major infrastructure, but rather the web itself.

Of course, the versions these languages are on now are far and away different from when they first launched. When the internet became mainstream, moving from things like college intranets and ARPANET, which sent the first email, and connecting the entire world, things were, by comparison, a little basic. Over time, mainstay coding languages like C, Java, and PHP have adapted to the times to stay current, even with newer, fresher options popping up. Naming every JavaScript derivative could be an excellent parody of the world song from "Animaniacs."

HTML is ubiquitous on the web, and without its standards, we wouldn't be where we are today. Launched in 1993, HTML provides a browser with a file that then opens as a webpage. Revolutionary at the time, HTML has become the standard the web lives by, and in 2019, transitioned to a "Living Standard," rather than versions. Colloquially, it is sometimes referred to as HTML5, which introduced new features to HTML, focusing on multimedia aspects of the web.

HTML was conceived by a CERN contractor, Tim Berners-Lee, who had developed a system for sharing documents among colleagues at the labs. This idea morphed into HTML in 1990, with Berners-Lee even developing browser and server software to ensure it could be viewed and hosted. Some of the first sets of instructions on using HTML are still live on the web today, being descriptions of tags used in the code.

Its fairly rudimentary basics make it an excellent language for beginners to pick up. Since it's still the de facto way to deliver pages, it never hurts to understand the software you use day in and day out.

Cascading Style Sheets are the backbone of how a website looks on the page. This dictates everything from how page layouts look to the color of the icons littered about the page. Essentially, without it, pages begin to revert back to that very early HTML look. Now coming up on its 30th anniversary, CSS launched in December 1996 and fundamentally changed how web pages looked forever.

CSS can be written directly in the HTML file itself, or the HTML file can point to a dedicated style sheet file elsewhere on the server. It's fairly simple to read, which makes it a relatively easy second language to pick up alongside HTML. It has grown massively in scope since its inception, bringing animations and more dynamic content to the mix. There are also plenty of frameworks built with their own ideas for how CSS should be handled.

It's an important cornerstone for the web and is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium. In 1994, the original vision for what CSS would be came into debate. Multiple other frameworks were also being proposed, with CSS winning out thanks to its "cascading" nature, allowing for multiple different style sheets to be used. CSS continues to get updates regularly, bringing new functionality to the web with each one.

PHP is what powers and drives a vast majority of websites, especially ones running WordPress, which itself is powered by PHP. Under the layers of easy user modifications to blogs and other websites lives one of the more divisive programming languages to use, with regular online posts asking why developers hate it. Described as a "mess" by forum-goers, it was effectively cobbled together by its original developer, Rasmus Lerdorf, who doesn't see himself as a "real programmer."

Developed in 1993 and released in '95, PHP has become an underpinning bit of tech throughout the internet. Aside from powering WordPress, it is also used on Wikipedia and Fandom wikis to power the back end of things. However, it was initially developed to bring together a bunch of C scripts that Lerdorf had written. From there, it began to be adopted as an easy way to elevate webpages, being implemented in early "dynamic" web apps, which build on request, rather than delivering a static page.

It is from the starting point that PHP began to give some developers headaches. As its popularity increased, so did the additional features, and thus, the "mess." To begin, it started trying to introduce Perl-esque syntax, but this inevitably spiraled out of control. Today, coders complain that PHP is inconsistent in its syntax, making it a little confusing or headache-inducing to learn and use, especially in comparison to other options.

Once described as the "duct tape" that held the internet together in 1998, Perl is still a fundamental part of the internet as we know it today. First debuting in 1987 and developed by Larry Wall, Perl has influenced what has come after it and has been the glue that has held everything together since.

It gained massive popularity in the 1990s, becoming a central part of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripting, allowing Perl to kick in a server-side script to alter the webpage. This ushered in a new method to interact with the web during the early days, but was eventually superseded by newer languages like PHP.

Search engines like DuckDuckGo are written in Perl, with CEO Gabriel Weinberg detailing the stack in a 2009 blog. It was using a successor to CGI scripting, FastCGI; however, it's a little harder to find modern information. DuckDuckGo must still use Perl in some capacity, as it donated $25,000 to the Perl and Raku Foundation in 2025. IMDb is another popular site that started out using Perl for users to access its database. However, the site appears to have moved to an undisclosed internal tool.

A programming language you might rarely hear about, Erlang handles billions of messages across various platforms every day. Discord and Meta's WhatsApp are built on Erlang, or use Elixir, a language built on top of one of Erlang's best features, BEAM. It is especially good at swapping messages across the internet, and it has a very bizarre history dating back to 1986.

Originally built as a method of handling calls by Ericsson, it was intended to be proprietary to the company. However, in 1998, it became open-source and has gone on to connect people worldwide. The people behind it, Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, and Mike Williams, found that the implementation of the programming language Prolog was too slow. This led to the development of BEAM, a virtual machine that runs Erlang code and allows multiple tasks to be run at once. BEAM is what Elixir is built on top of, making it easier for modern programmers to implement Erlang's functionality.

The Nintendo Switch uses ejabberd, a chat platform built using Erlang, while "League of Legends" developer Riot Games has implemented it to handle the in-game messaging system. Popular social media apps, outside of Discord and WhatsApp, are also using it, with Grindr being originally built on Erlang.