Module 1.1: History of Programming Languages

Analytical Engine (1837)

• Developed by the British mathematician Charles Babbage

• It is a Mechanical general-purpose computer

• The input was to be provided via punched cards, for the output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter, and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read later.

Ada Lovelace

• The person credited with the first “program” to be executed by the Analytical Engine

Plankalkul (1941)

• It is a computer language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse; a German engineer and inventor.

• First high-level non-von Neumann programming language

• It was invented as the programming language for the Z3: The first programmable electromechanical computing machine, also built by Zuse

• This language included many of the syntactical elements of structured programming languages that would be invented later, but it failed to be recognized widely.

Short Code (1949)

• It was the first higher-level language ever developed and used for a computer, designed by John Mauchly

• Unlike machine code, this language’s statements represented mathematical expressions rather than a machine instruction

• The language was interpreted and ran slower than machine code.

John Mauchly

• The person who designed shortcode and the co-inventor of UNIVAC 1, the first commercial computer in the USA.

A-0 (1951)

• Written by Grace Hopper in 1951 and 1952 for the UNIVAC 1

• The first compiler system ever developed for a computer

• It functioned more as a loader/linker than the modern notion of a compiler