Officially, the first programming language for a computer was Plankalkül, developed by Konrad Zuse for the Z3 between 1943 and 1945. However, it was not implemented until 1998.

Short Code, which was proposed by John Mauchly in 1949, is considered to be the first high-level programming language. It was designed to represent mathematical expressions in a format readable by human beings. However, because it had to be translated into machine code before it could be executed, it had relatively slow processing speeds.

Other early programming languages were developed in the 1950s and 1960s, including Autocode, COBOL, FLOW-MATIC, and LISP. Of these, only COBOL and LISP are still in use today.

  • The history of the computer
  • See our programming language definition for further information and related links.
  • Computer history questions and answers.