A Brief History of Programming Languages: From 1843 to Today

The Dawn of Code

Nowadays, programming languages are all around us. It's how we keep the systems and devices we use every day operating and running smoothly. They allow for us measly humans to interact and make cool, fun, or random things just by tapping a few buttons. In fact, I would guess if you're reading this article, you probably know a few programming languages. But what was the first programming language?

Well, if you look this up on Google, you're going to find varying results. People claimed that maybe it's Autocode by Alec Glenny in the early 1950s, or maybe it's Fortran, also developed in the 1950s. But in all actuality, computer science, when it relates to programming, started much earlier than this. Computer science, when it relates to programming, actually dates way back as far as 1843 with Ada Lovelace and her experimentations.

I'm not going to bore you to death with the details of 1800s computer science concepts, but there are several key concepts that she understood that paved the way and honestly started the foundation of all computer programming languages as we know it.

The Visionary: Ada Lovelace

When Ada Lovelace was young, she was incredibly intelligent. So much so that her mathematical talents led her to a long and rewarding friendship with Charles Babbage, the known father of computers. Now, what we really need to know is that Charles Babbage had a breakthrough in the 1820s, inventing the Difference Machine. This was literally the first successful, fully automatic calculator, and to be honest, that was its main purpose. But this was out-of-the-world, unthinkable at the time.

Lovelace, seeing this, immediately had a revelation of her own. She realized that Babbage's machine could do much more than just calculate; it was a general-purpose machine for whatever you might want to do. In fact, Lovelace was the first person to make the leap that numbers could actually represent other things digitally. Right then, the idea of programming languages was first born.

I actually researched more into this, and beyond just that, she thought about how to repeat a series of instructions with machines and came up with looping. She literally conjured up what loops now are, with for-loops and while-loops, back in the 1800s.

The Universal Machine: Alan Turing

Now, after Ada Lovelace, there was actually a huge gap in the timeline. No one knew at the time how to convert machine code and what machines created into actual programming languages. This was until Alan Turing made a groundbreaking discovery.

Alan Turing, another prominent figure in the computer science upbringing, was a famous computer scientist for his work on cracking Nazi Germany's Enigma code. Turing came up with the concept that built upon Ada Lovelace's original ideas, which was that there very well could be a universal machine—one that could follow instructions, was powered by electricity, and could run programs.

The First Languages Emerge

Shortly after this, we had the onslaught of actual programming languages appear. But many wonder, what was the first legitimate programming language? Well, it turns out the very first programming language to actually be used was created between 1942 and 1945 and was named Plankalkül. It was an extremely important programming language at the time, created by Konrad Zuse.

Plankalkül was the first semi-high-level programming language, and it was mainly used to store codes, which at the time enabled engineers to carry out routines or repetitive tasks way easier than simply doing it themselves. Little did Konrad know, this was the beginning of the onslaught of many more programming languages that most of us know and love today.

Assembly and the Rise of Low-Level Code

However, while Konrad Zuse was creating Plankalkül, there was another computer scientist at the University of London, Kathleen Booth, another historical woman figure in the computer science industry. Kathleen created the first majorly popular programming language at the time: Assembly. This was first created in 1947 and has been used non-stop, even up to the present date.

This was the first public and accessible step that was above machine language and was before the revolution of some of the most infamous high-level programming languages. Assembly in itself is a very low-level programming language. Its intentions are to communicate directly with the computer's hardware via keyword access modifiers, just like we use today.

However, many have described Assembly syntax as rigorous and difficult to learn, but once you learn it, it shows the true relationship between the programmer and the computer itself.

The Explosion of High-Level Languages

After Assembly was created in 1947, numerous foundational programming languages were built. Fortran, Autocode, COBOL, BASIC, Haskell, C, and SQL, all of which date back before 1975, built what we know to be high-level programming languages.

In some ways, their principles were later designed and modified off of with newer programming languages like Java, Python, Ruby, C++, PHP, C#, JavaScript, and various others.

A Lasting Legacy

At the end of the day, all of the languages we use today, for whatever reasons—whether it be game development, software engineering, cybersecurity, or hobbies, our side jobs, our careers—everything is all thanks to the founding pioneers of computer science.