HACKER Q&A
📣 FerkiHN

Is Fortran the first high-level language?


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.

  👤 mindcrime Accepted Answer ✓
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.

👤 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.