History of Programming Languages

The first programming languages predate the modern computer. From the first,
the languages were codes.

During a nine-month period in 1842-1843, Ada Lovelace translated Italian
mathematician Luigi Menabrea's memoir on Charles Babbage's newest proposed
machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes
which specified in complete detail a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers
with the Engine, recognized by some historians as the world's first computer
program. But some biographers debate the extent of her original contributions
versus those of her husband.

The Jacquard loom used holes in punched cards to represent sewing loom arm
movements in order to generate decorative patterns automatically.

Herman Hollerith realized that he could encode information on punch cards
when he observed that railroad train conductors would encode the appearance
of the ticket holders on the train tickets using the position of punched
holes on the tickets. Hollerith then proceeded to encode the 1890 census data
on punch cards.

The first computer codes were specialized for the applications. In the first
decades of the twentieth century, numerical calculations were based on decimal
numbers. Eventually it was realized that logic could be represented with
numbers, as well as with words. For example, Alonzo Church was able to express
the lambda calculus in a formulaic way. The Turing machine was an abstraction
of the operation of a tape-marking machine, for example, in use at the telephone
companies. However, unlike the lambda calculus, Turing's code does not serve
well as a basis for higher-level languages — its principal use is in rigorous
analyses of algorithmic complexity.

Like many "firsts" in history, the first modern programming language is hard
to identify. From the start, the restrictions of the hardware defined the
language. Punch cards allowed 80 columns, but some of the columns had to be
used for a sorting number on each card. Fortran included some keywords which
were the same as English words, such as "IF", "GOTO" (go to) and "CONTINUE".
The use of a magnetic drum for memory meant that computer programs also had
to be interleaved with the rotations of the drum. Thus the programs were more
hardware dependent than today.

To some people the answer depends on how much power and human-readability
is required before the status of "programming language" is granted. Jacquard
looms and Charles Babbage's Difference Engine both had simple, extremely
limited languages for describing the actions that these machines should
perform. One can even regard the punch holes on a player piano scroll as
a limited domain-specific programming language, albeit not designed for
human consumption.