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

3•FerkiHN•4mo ago

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.

Comments

PaulHoule•4mo ago

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.

mindcrime•4mo ago

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

ThrowawayR2•4mo ago

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•4mo ago

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 hn@ycombinator.com

alexander2002•4mo ago

Wait till you learn how llms search engines (Perplexity looking at you !) give priority to reddit comments and how people are exploiting that.

PaulHoule•4mo ago

I dunno what the point is. This user is weirdly noisy if you look at the history, directly addressing the moderators at times, etc.

Back when I was spamming a site (had no email check so it was easy) to drive traffic for my blog I had a few hundred sock puppet accounts which were all really bland and tried not to stick out and made sure to vote for many other peoole’s blogs randomly so it wouldn’t be obvious that they were part of something. I never got caught and it ended when I lost the database of accounts from a hard drive crash.

This guy is getting lots of posts [dead] and still barreling on. If it was some kind of sophisticated influence operation I’d expect them to be more saavy (maybe even keep backups!)

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