Even though a huge number of computer languages exist, the earliest computers were programmed in binary so the set of instructions was just a series of 0 and 1. Computer languages are a fairly new field, since the first high-level languages were written in the 1950s, around the time computers were invented. Before computer programming languages were made, paper tapes and punch cards which held complicated weaving patterns for the loom Tabulating Machine Company Looms by Jacquard in 1710. A century later, Charles Babbage started building a computing and the analytical Machine. In the 20th century, Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine. His machine tabulators were used to speed up the counting and sorting of punch cards. In the early 1940s J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly started building the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), which was completed by 1946.

The first high-level programming language was Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945^[1]. The first high-level language to have an associated compiler, was created by Corrado Böhm in 1951, for his PhD thesis. The first commercially available language was FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation); developed in 1956 (first manual appeared in 1956, but first developed in 1954) by John Backus, a worker at IBM.

When FORTRAN was first introduced it was treated with suspicion because of the belief that programs compiled from high-level language would be less efficient than those written directly in machine code. FORTRAN became popular because it provided a means of porting existing code to new computers, in a hardware market that was rapidly evolving. FORTRAN eventually became known for its efficiency. Over the years, FORTRAN had been updated, with standards released for FORTRAN-66, FORTRAN-77 and FORTRAN-92.

In the 1940s, the first recognizably modern electrically powered computers were created. The limited speed and memory capacity forced programmers to write hand tuned assembly language programs. It was eventually realized that programming in assembly language required a great deal of intellectual effort.

The first programming languages designed to communicate instructions to a computer were written in the 1950s. An early high-level programming language to be designed for a computer was Plankalkül, developed by the Germans for Z1 by Konrad Zuse between 1943 and 1945. However, it was not implemented until 1998 and 2000.^[3]

John Mauchly’s Short Code, proposed in 1949, was one of the first high-level languages ever developed for an electronic computer.^[4] Unlike machine code, Short Code statements represented mathematical expressions in understandable form. However, the program had to be translated into machine code every time it ran, making the process much slower than running the equivalent machine code.

At the University of Manchester, Alick Glennie developed Autocode in the early 1950s, with the second iteration developed for the Mark 1 by R. A. Brooker in 1954, known as the “Mark 1 Autocode”. Brooker also developed an autocode for the Ferranti Mercury in the 1950s in conjunction with the University of Manchester. The version for the EDSAC 2 was devised by D. F. Hartley of University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in 1961. Known as EDSAC 2 Autocode, it was a straight development from Mercury Autocode adapted for local circumstances, and was noted for its object code optimisation and source-language diagnostics which were advanced for the time. A contemporary but separate thread of development, Atlas Autocode was developed for the University of Manchester Atlas 1 machine.

In 1954, language FORTRAN was invented at IBM by a team led by John Backus; it was the first widely used high level general purpose programming language to have a functional implementation, as opposed to just a design on paper. It is still a popular language for high-performance computing^[7] and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers.^[8]

Another early programming language was devised by Grace Hopper in the US, called FLOW-MATIC. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand during the period from 1955 until 1959. Hopper found that business data processing customers were uncomfortable with mathematical notation, and in early 1955, she and her team wrote a specification for an English programming language and implemented a prototype.^[9] The FLOW-MATIC compiler became publicly available in early 1958 and was substantially complete in 1959.^[10] Flow-Matic was a major influence in the design of COBOL, since only it and its direct descendent AIMACO were in actual use at the time.^[11]

Other languages still in use today include LISP (1958), invented by John McCarthy and COBOL (1959), created by the Short Range Committee. Another milestone in the late 1950s was the publication, by a committee of American and European computer scientists, of “a new language for algorithms”; the ALGOL 60 Report (the “ALGOrithmic Language”). This report consolidated many ideas circulating at the time and featured three key language innovations:

• nested block structure: code sequences and associated declarations could be grouped into blocks without having to be turned into separate, explicitly named procedures;
• lexical scoping: a block could have its own private variables, procedures and functions, invisible to code outside that block, that is, information hiding.

Another innovation, related to this, was in how the language was described:

• a mathematically exact notation, Backus–Naur form (BNF), was used to describe the language’s syntax. Nearly all subsequent programming languages have used a variant of BNF to describe the context-free portion of their syntax.

Algol 60 was particularly influential in the design of later languages, some of which soon became more popular. The Burroughs large systems were designed to be programmed in an extended subset of Algol.

Algol’s key ideas were continued, producing ALGOL 68:

• syntax and semantics became even more orthogonal, with anonymous routines, a recursive typing system with higher-order functions, etc.;
• not only the context-free part, but the full language syntax and semantics were defined formally, in terms of Van Wijngaarden grammar, a formalism designed specifically for this purpose.

Algol 68’s many little-used language features (for example, concurrent and parallel blocks) and its complex system of syntactic shortcuts and automatic type coercions made it unpopular with implementers and gained it a reputation of being difficult. Niklaus Wirth actually walked out of the design committee to create the simpler Pascal language.

Some notable languages that were developed in this period include: