The Early Development of Programming Languages**The preparation of this paper has been supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant No. MCS 72-03752 A03, by the Office of Naval Research contract N00014-76-C-0330, and by IBM Corporation. The authors wish to thank the originators of the languages cited for their many helpful comments on early drafts of this paper.††Reprinted from J. Belzer, A. G. Holzman, and A. Kent (eds.), 'Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology,' Vol. 6, pp. 419–493. Dekker, New York, 1977. Courtesy of Marcel Dekker, Inc

This paper surveys the evolution of “high-lever” programming languages during the first decade of computer programming activity. We discuss the contributions of Zuse in 1945 (the “Plankalkul”), Goldstine and von Neumann in 1946 (“Flow Diagrams”), Curry in 1948 (“Composition”), Mauchly et al. in 1949 (“Short Code”), Burks in 1950 (“Intermediate PL”), Rutishauser in 1951 (“Klammerausdrucke”), Bohm in 1951 (“Formules”), Glennie in 1952 (“AUTOCODE”), Hopper et al. in 1953 (“A-2”), Laning and Zierler in 1953 (“Algebraic Interpreter”), Backus et al. in 1954–1957 (“FORTRAN”), Brooker in 1954 (“Mark I AUTOCODE”), Kamynin and Liubimskii in 1954 (“ΠΠ-2”), Ershov in 1955 (“ΠΠ”), Grems and Porter in 1955 (“BACAIC”), Elsworth et al. in 1955 (“Kompiler 2”), Blum in 1956 (“ADES”), Perlis et al. in 1956 (“IT”), Katz et al. in 1956–1958 (“MATH-MATIC”), Bauer and Samelson in 1956–1958 (U.S. Patent 3,047,228). The principal features of each contribution are illustrated and discussed. For purposes of comparison, a particular fixed algorithm has been encoded (as far as possible) in each of the languages. This research is based primarily on unpublished source materials, and the authors hope that they have been able to compile a fairly complete picture of the early developments in this area.