The History of Computer Programming:.
Computers began in 1822 with Charles Babbage's invention of the difference engine. This was in fact the first mechanical computer ever; it could perform simple calculations and executed these tasks by changing gears for different operations. .
" The earliest form of a computer language was physical motion." .
In 1945, John Von Neumann who worked for the Institute for Advanced Study devised two important concepts that helped sculpt the future of computer programming. The first point he made became known as "Shared-Program Technique", it stated that the actual computers hardware should be simple and not need to be hand-wired for each program. Instead, complex instructions should be used to control simple hardware, allowing reprogramming at a later time to be much faster. His second idea, known as "Conditional Control Transfer" acknowledged the fact that chronological computer instructions should be replaced by blocks of codes that can be called upon in any order at anytime. The second half of this idea stated the idea of logical statements such as the If Then statement and looping statements.
In 1957, the world first got a taste of a major programming language in the form of FORTRAN (Its name standing for FORmula TRANslating System). This language was designed at IBM for scientific calculations and although it did that well, it was not designed to handle input and output from users, which was what most people/companies expected.
This is why in 1958 the Algol language was created. Its basis has helped mold other well-known (and more recent) programming languages such as Pascal, C, C++ and Java. .