In a 2014 paper, David Nofre, Gerard Alberts and I argued that during the 1950s programming notations became conceptualized as formal languages. This process was driven by the desire to write programs that could run on different types of computer, a pressing issue in particular for university computing centres. Researchers dreamed of “universal” programming languages which could run on any machine and so make the details of specific computers vanish, at least from the programmer’s point of view.
This is not the whole story, however: perhaps a more pressing need in the 1950s was simply to make programming easier and more accessible to people outside the very small group of computer experts. In a chapter in the recently published book Computing Cultures I argue that this led to a different view of programming notations: originally intended to get round the limitations of existing computers, they were later designed in tandem with definitions of “synthetic” or “virtual” machines that ran on the existing hardware. Rather than hiding the computer, programming languages offered a way of transforming an intractable machine into something more immediately useful. As Grace Hopper’s 1954 cartoon illustrates, notations were seen as masks which concealed a computer in order to increase its availability and usefulness.
The chapter discusses the various automatic coding systems developed for MIT’s Whirlwind computer in the early 1950s, including the Summer Session Computer of 1953 and the algebraic interpreter implemented by J. Halcombe Laning and Neil Zierler in 1954, and the links between these systems and early programming languages such as FORTRAN and COMIT.
The Computing Cultures book is open-access and can be downloaded from the publisher’s website. A pdf of my chapter is available here.