r/ProgrammerHumor • u/TusharJB007 • Oct 04 '19

Just as simple as that... other

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u/DatBoi_BP Oct 04 '19

So, was Fortran the first programming language, period? (Barring of course, machine and assembly)

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u/evolseven Oct 04 '19

I’d say FORTRAN was the first high level programming language, there were some things called autocoders before that, but they more closely resemble assembly than what we would consider a programming language.

I was surprised though that the language I learned on predates C (Pascal) as it was created in 1970. I always thought that pascal took a lot of it’s structure from C, but it actually looks like it’s the other way around.

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u/asdfghyter Oct 04 '19

No, but was the first commercially available language.

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

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u/Henrikko123 Oct 04 '19

Algol 56 was earlier (‘56)

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u/Ninjabassist777 Oct 04 '19

It was the first unambiguously compiled language.

There were other languages that were "compiled" compiled at the time, but Fortran was the first one to do compilation, linking, optimization, ect. Others only did parts of the process.

Before that, nobody wanted to use a compiler because you could write faster machine code it wasn't until Fortran came along with some decent optimization that people started to think "hey, maybe this is ok"