The Rise of Programming Languages

Once computers existed, the problem became how to tell them what to do. The earliest machines were programmed in raw numeric codes, one instruction at a time, which was slow and error-prone. The story of this era is the effort to let people write programs in something closer to their own language and have the machine do the translating.

The breakthrough was the compiler. In 1952 Grace Hopper built the A-0 system, generally credited as the first compiler, a program that turned symbolic instructions into machine code. Many doubted it could work, believing computers could only ever handle numbers. It did work, and it opened the door to high-level languages.

They arrived quickly. FORTRAN, released by IBM in 1957, made scientific computing accessible to non-specialists. LISP, designed by John McCarthy in 1958, became central to artificial intelligence. COBOL, shaped by Hopper’s ideas, ran business and government systems for decades. By the early 1970s the C language, created at Bell Labs, was setting the pattern that most modern languages still follow.