Programming Language

A programming language is a formal, human readable language for writing instructions a computer can be made to carry out, translated into the machine's own instructions either ahead of time, by a compiler, or as it runs, by an interpreter. Early programming was done directly in a machine's own numeric instructions or in assembly language, a readable but still machine specific stand-in for them; Fortran, released in 1957, is often considered the first high level language to see wide use, letting a programmer write ordinary arithmetic notation instead. Grace Hopper's compiler work at Remington Rand in the early 1950s led to FLOW-MATIC and then to COBOL, a language deliberately designed to read like English sentences so that people without a mathematics background could write and check business programs, an approach to language design distinct from Fortran's numerical focus.