Who Invented Computer Programming?
The earliest mechanical computers were invented in the late 19th century. The earliest example of a modern computer language is FORTRAN, developed by a team of researchers at IBM in the 1950s.
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Early Types of Programming
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Some historians credit the 13th-century Muslim engineer Al-Jazari with the earliest example of programming. Among the dozens of machines Al-Jazari described and built were several whose actions could by altered or modified by changing their instructions. This is the same concept underlying modern computer programming.
Charles Babbage
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Englishman Charles Babbage is often credited with being the father of modern computing. He described machines that would be able to perform complex math as early as 1822. Because of funding problems, many of Babbage's machines were not built in his lifetime.
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Mechanical Computing
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Babbage's designs and inventions formed the basis for adding machines and other mechanical calculating devices that became common business tools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Evolution of Programming Language
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What separates an authentic computer language from the mechanical programming of earlier eras is portability: the ability to give a machine instructions through its programming, meaning that the instructions can be changed without completely rebuilding the machine.
FORTRAN
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The first modern computer language was FORTRAN, developed by a team at IBM in the 1950s. The name FORTRAN is a shortening of Formula Translation.
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