A Partially Correct History of Programming Languages
[Edited without permission from Dartmouth’s CS68 97W]
Konrad Zuse's Plankalkul (1945) was perhaps the first language designed for expressing computation on a computer; but never implemented
FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) was the first high-level language implemented, with an emphasis on efficiency of compiled code; design and implementation team led by John Backus (1954-57)
LISP (LISt Processor) was a language designed for symbolic processing (mostly for AI users); McCarthy at MIT (1958); introduced symbolic computation and automatic memory management