The first use of the term “programming language”? | Hacker News Reader

The first use of the term “programming language”?

cs.uni.edu

44 pointsjanvdberg15 comments

The post is a speculation whether a January 1957 paper, "Programming the Logic Theory Machine", by Newell and Shaw might be the first published use (or "definition") of the term "programming language".

It is always interesting to look at beginnings and early signs of notions - concepts - that we use in our everyday lives. The particular phrasing, I don't know if that should matter so much.

Chomsky's work on formal languages falls roughly in that epoch of 50s, ALGOL and COBOL, too.

"Computing" wasn't what it is today, I think mathematical and electrical engineering background of the computing experts would affect what language (pun intended) they used. The idea (and term) of "languages" stayed but what makes a term popular is hard to settle.

I think in terms of concept, formal (mathematical) logic predates all this by a few decades. The subtitle of Frege's 1879 "Begriffsschrift" was "Eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens" which I would render as "A formula language of pure thought, modeled after the arithmetical one". I think the roots are rather there...

I'd expect Leibniz's language would count (except it wasn't completed) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis

It would be interesting to get an account of the usage of the term programming through the development of linear optimization/programming and its usage during WW2, the simplex algorithm, etc, until the creation of fortran not a decade later.

I wonder how dynamic programming fits into all this and when people started to investigate classic problems ala knapsack.

> It is always interesting to look at beginnings and early signs of notions - concepts - that we use in our everyday lives.

To add one in here: Cipher Block Chaining was invented in 1976. Blockchain is now common parlance.

Despite both having the word block and chain, they aren’t really related. CBC mode is not even requisite to implement a block chain.

Merkle Trees are from 1979 and those are one of the core concepts for most blockchain implementations (a Blockchain proper is, technically, just a merkle tree with a branching factor of 1).

See also the paper by Knuth and his student Luis Trabb Pardo, "The Early Development of Programming Languages" (1976) -- its long story ends in 1957, the year this speculation is about. There's a typewritten version available online (e.g. at http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/stanford/cs_techRepor...) (TeX didn't exist yet), but a nicely typeset (and slightly updated) version occupies pages 1 to 93 of Knuth's Selected Papers on Computer Languages (the fifth volume of Knuth's collected papers).

The many programming languages/systems described in that article go by various names like "automatic coding" and whatnot. For example, Burks in 1950 used "intermediate program language" (as something above the "internal program language"). (The PDF linked above actually uses "intermediate programming language" but the more recent printed book uses "intermediate program language" so that's probably correct.)

I confess I haven't properly read the Knuth and Trabb-Pardo article yet... maybe there's a historical mention of the actual term "programming language" in there somewhere.

The notion of "Programming" was mentioned and even defined in 1947 by Donald Booth. See http://bobmackay.com/Booth/Booth.html Principles and Progress in the Construction of High-Speed Digital Computers.

"The word 'programme' as used in this context may require explanation. Before a problem is ready for solution in a computing machine it must first be broken up into processes which the machine is capable of performing. Thus, as mentioned above, when using a digital machine the continuous process of differentiation must be replaced by a finite difference formula. This translating of a problem in terms of the available functions of the machine is generally known as programming."

However he did not use the word "language" as only assembler was known at the time, and he was the first to use even that.

In a formal paper, the author is likely correct but the term almost certainly back much further colloquially.

Fun to see a post on HN from UNI, my alma mater. I attended a few schools and it was by far my favorite! Ranked second[0] in the best public non-research universities in the midwest too.

[0]https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/regional-unive...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

Even in German, appears the term was closer to "formal system", not "programming language".

"Kalkül is the German term for a formal system—as in Hilbert-Kalkül, the original name for the Hilbert-style deduction system—so Plankalkül refers to a formal system for planning.[2]"

Kalkül is calculus. (E.g. Lambda-Kalkül)

A calculus is a formal system.

A quick search on Google books for the term "programming language" with the date confined to between 1945-1956 (although you may find more earlier) does turn up multiple results.

Every single one of them seems to be a case of Google Books misunderstanding the date of a publication -- in some cases, because several volumes have been bound together into a single physical book, and Google Books is showing the earliest date as that of the volume.

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