Ask HN: Is Fortran the first high-level language?

[FerkiHN]

I've been wondering if it's always so clear what and when came first, I think not. I think that before there were definitely some programming languages that were higher level than Fortran, it's just that Fortran gained a lot of popularity. If you know, please share those high-level programming languages that existed before Fortran, but almost no one knows about them.

[ThrowawayR2]

Kind of suspicious that there are two recent posts with identical titles and text on different accounts:

- Ask HN: Is Fortran the first high-level language? 1 point by zaraz123 2 hours ago | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45395853

- Ask HN: Is Fortran the first high-level language? 1 point by zoo56 2 hours ago | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45395848

And that this user makes replies to one of the other accounts above:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zoo56

[EDIT] This user seems to have several alt accounts, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Forgret and note that the git repository referenced by that user is also referenced by comments from this user.

[codingdave]

Yeah, such things make me put on my tinfoil hat and be suspicious that bad actors are trying to build up accounts before an election year. But whether or not that is true, you can report suspicious behavior to [e-mail]

[mindcrime]

It was certainly one of the first, and for the most part I think it's generally regarded as the first "real" high level language. But there are a number of other languages that were developed at approximately the same time where you could probably quibble a bit about exactly which one came first. COBOL[1], for example, and some of the predecessors to COBOL, like FLOW-MATIC[2] and ARITH-MATIC[3]. Also, as PaulHoule mentions, there was LISP[4], and then there was IPL[5] which LISP descended from. COMIT[6] also dates back to that general era.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARITH-MATIC

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Languag...

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMIT

[PaulHoule]

Lisp started out at the same time and represents a different family of languages.

In the 1960s there was a lot of work on languages like ALGOL and PL/I which were intended to occupy the niche that C occupied. One problem was that people didn’t know what I/O was going to look like and didn’t realize it didn’t matter for language design because you could relegate I/O to the standard library.