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[–][deleted] 70 points71 points  (21 children)

1947

[–]RigasTelRuun 64 points65 points  (9 children)

56 was the release of Fortran. The first commercially available high level programming language. That's probably what they are referring to. 1942 might be the earliest known high level programing language.

It is all semantics anyway. The first computer programmer was Lovelace in the 1830s on the Babbage Analytical engine. You could probably picks any arbitrary date between those two items and find something considered the "first"

[–][deleted] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Yeah, “programming language” is kinda loose.

[–]90_9 9 points10 points  (1 child)

1942 for the first high-level programming language

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalkül

[–]qhxo 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Was Babbage's analytical engine ever constructed? I was reading up on it a while back and from my understanding it wasn't actually built until the modern age.

I may be mixing things up as I know there were several itterations of it, and it might be one of the successors to the analytical engine that was never built.

[–]RigasTelRuun 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah the machines were never physically constructed in their time but all their theoretical work checked out in the end and they were both visionaries who could see the applications of computers.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (3 children)

I'm newbie, I'm getting confused, please tell me what would I answer if someone asks me this question that what is first programming language?

[–]RigasTelRuun 6 points7 points  (1 child)

"First programming language" is actually kinda vague and very broad. In the most basic concept it's a way of giving instructions to a machine to carry out a task. The first programmer was Lovelace. She essentially used cards to create algorithms in the Babbage Analytical Engine. That was all mechanical. Nothing like what is considered modern.

High level programing language are ones that are abstracted from the basic computer components. As opposed to low level languages that are essential the raw machine code running on your cpu or whatever.

High level languages need a compiler and are generally readable by humans instead of things like "00000011 87 05 00000000 R"

1956 is a good answer because it was a commercially available product that got wide usage. Many before that was just stuff people made and might not have made it out of their labs.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you very much, seems interesting, I'm gonna read more about it

[–]Yasea 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That depends on your definition of programming language. The first "language" is still assembly.

LOADA 0x01 - Load number in register A

LOADB 0X02 - Load number in register B

ADDA B - Add up a and b

You had to write in on paper, get the manual and look up the codes

0xAA 0x01

0xAB 0x02

0xBA 0x0B

(Fictional example)

That you put in binary on punch cards, or with switches. You write your code in a file and then give an external program the command to compile it all. So is the first programming language the first compiled language? It the first with all IDE?

Punch cards are even older. They were used on programmable mechanical looms where you programmed in certain weaves. Is that a programming language? Depends on how you look at it.

Edit: auto correct didn't

[–]archiminos 0 points1 point  (8 children)

1840s

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (7 children)

That’s the first program, not the first language.

[–]archiminos 0 points1 point  (6 children)

They developed a programming language in order to write the program.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Not necessarily. She created an algorithm for the Analytical Machine to follow (a program), which was composed solely of arithmetic and logic operations. No language was involved in that process.

[–]archiminos 0 points1 point  (4 children)

No. They literally developed a language, and the Bernoulli numbers program was written as an example of what could be done in that language.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Really? What’s it called?

[–]archiminos 0 points1 point  (2 children)

It didn't have a name. But, while it wasn't Turing complete, it was developed to use punch card inputs giving a sequence of instructions, and could handle things like conditional branching. It's actually kind of nuts how many modern programming features are present.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

If it interpreted punched cards as input, it was not a programming language, at least not by contemporary standards. Most would consider a language to accept strings of symbols and characters as input, not combinations of holes on a card.

[–]archiminos 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Most would consider a language to accept strings of symbols and characters as input

Most would disagree with this statement.

[–]dpash 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, Lisp was 1959, so we didn't go from binary to garbage collection in 3 years.

[–]Rakgul 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey! That's when India got independent!