The First Programming Language: A Timeline From 1843 to C

The first computer program was written by Ada Lovelace in 1843, for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a machine that was never built. The first high-level programming language was Konrad Zuse’s Plankalkül, designed between 1943 and 1945 but never run on a machine at the time, while Fortran, released by IBM in 1957, was the first to reach widespread use.

Those three answers cover almost every version of the question, and the distance between them explains why people still disagree about which language came first. Writing an algorithm, designing a language, and running working code on real hardware are separate achievements, and they happened decades apart.

This guide takes the history in order, from Lovelace through Autocode, Fortran, Lisp, Cobol and C, then turns to what any of it means for a site running today. Most business websites still sit on foundations laid in the 1950s and 1970s, which is why the WordPress development services a company buys now are still shaped by decisions made at IBM and Bell Labs. There is also a short method further down for checking which language any public website is written in.

Quick Timeline: The First Programming Languages by Year

Here is the shortlist most people are actually looking for, each entry showing the language, the year, the person behind it, and the “first” it holds.

Ada Lovelace and the First Computer Program (1843)

Ada Lovelace is widely recognised as the world’s first computer programmer, and she is often called the mother of programming. Working on Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine, Lovelace wrote a set of notes that included an algorithm to calculate Bernoulli numbers. That algorithm, set down in 1843, is considered the first computer program, even though the machine it was written for was never built.

What made her work matter was not the arithmetic. Lovelace saw that a machine could manipulate symbols, not just numbers, and speculated that it might one day compose music or produce graphics. That idea sat unrealised for roughly a century, but it is the conceptual root of everything that followed.

The Hidden First: Konrad Zuse’s Plankalkül (1943 to 1945)

Between 1943 and 1945, German engineer Konrad Zuse designed Plankalkül, meaning “plan calculus”. It is arguably the first high-level programming language, because it let a developer describe a problem in a readable form rather than in raw machine code. Plankalkül supported arrays, records and structured procedures, features that would not become standard elsewhere for decades.

The catch is timing. Zuse could not publish during or immediately after the Second World War, so Plankalkül stayed largely unknown outside Germany until the 1970s. It was designed but never implemented on a working machine at the time, which is why the “first” title is so contested. Design came first from Zuse; working implementation came from others.

The UK’s Role: The Manchester Baby and Autocode (1948 to 1952)

Most histories of early code jump straight from Lovelace to American giants like IBM, which skips a chapter that matters a great deal in Britain and Ireland. On 21 June 1948, the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, known as the Manchester Baby, ran the world’s first stored-program computation at the University of Manchester. The program was written by Tom Kilburn and did something deliberately small: find the highest factor of a given number.

The Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, which holds the machine’s story, records that the Baby was assembled partly from war surplus parts, some of them from Bletchley Park. For the first time, a machine held its instructions in memory rather than in physical wiring, which is the model every computer uses now.

That breakthrough set up the next one. Around 1952, Alick Glennie wrote Autocode for the Manchester Mark 1, generally regarded as the first compiled programming language to run on a British computer. Autocode let a programmer write something closer to algebra, which a compiler then translated into machine instructions. It never spread the way Fortran later did, partly because it was tied to specific Manchester hardware, but it proved the compiler idea worked in practice. Cambridge made its own contribution with EDSAC, one of the first machines to run practical programs and the setting for early assembly work in 1949.

Assembly and Machine Code: How Code Was Physically “Typed”

Before any of these languages, programming meant working at the level the hardware understood. Machine code is pure binary, strings of ones and zeros that map directly to processor operations. Writing anything useful that way is slow and error-prone, so assembly language arrived as a bridge.

Assembly, used on EDSAC at Cambridge from 1949, swapped binary for short mnemonic codes. The machine’s Initial Orders, written by David Wheeler, let programmers enter instructions as letters and numbers rather than raw binary. Instead of typing out long binary strings to move a value into a register, a programmer could write a short readable instruction. It is still a real question whether assembly counts as a full programming language or a thin layer over machine code, and the honest answer is that it sits in between. Either way, it made programs writable by humans rather than only by specialists memorising binary.

Getting a program into the machine was a physical act. On many early systems you entered instructions with plugs and wires, or fed in punched cards, stiff paper cards where the pattern of holes represented the code. A mistake meant re-punching a card. That friction is a big part of why high-level languages caught on so fast once compilers made them possible.

Assembly still has a place today for tasks needing precise hardware control. Most businesses never touch it, but it explains why some technical work, like squeezing better Core Web Vitals scores from a slow site, stays genuinely difficult rather than a simple settings change.

The 1950s: Fortran, Lisp and Cobol

The late 1950s produced the three languages that shaped almost everything after them.

Fortran (1957)

John Backus and his team at IBM released Fortran, short for Formula Translation, in 1957. It is the oldest programming language still in widespread use. Built for scientific and engineering calculation, Fortran proved that a high-level language could match hand-written machine code closely enough on speed while being far quicker to write. Its performance record is why it never fully left research computing, weather modelling and physics.

Lisp (1958)

John McCarthy created Lisp, from “list processing”, in 1958. It was the first functional programming language and the first to use tree data structures, and it introduced automatic memory management. Lisp’s ideas run right through modern artificial intelligence work, which is one reason the language still gets studied by teams building machine learning and language tools today.

Cobol (1959)

Cobol arrived in 1959 from the CODASYL committee, building on Grace Hopper’s earlier work on English-like compilers, with backing from the US Department of Defense to keep it compatible across machines. It was the first high-level language built specifically for business, using English-like syntax so managers, not just engineers, could read a program.

A 2022 survey of 1,104 IT professionals across 49 countries, carried out by Vanson Bourne for Micro Focus, put the volume of Cobol running on production systems at 775 to 850 billion lines, against earlier estimates of 200 to 300 billion. In the UK it remains embedded in banking and parts of the public sector. Cobol is the clearest example of both the value of stable technology and the cost of technical debt when a system outlives everyone who understood it.

C and the Languages Behind Your Website (1972)

Dennis Ritchie built C at Bell Labs between 1972 and 1973. Unix and its descendants, including Linux, macOS and Android, are written largely in C, as are most operating systems, databases and web servers. It is the backbone most web development work quietly relies on.

For a business with a website, that legacy is everywhere even if you never see it. The server hosting a WordPress site almost certainly runs Linux, written in C. The web server is usually Apache or Nginx, both C. The database is often MySQL or PostgreSQL, also C. None of that is visible from the browser, which is why performance work is as much about the stack underneath as the code on top, and why the quality of a site’s managed WordPress hosting often matters more than the theme sitting above it.

How To Check Which Programming Language a Website Is Written In

This is one of the most common practical questions people bring to this topic, so here is a direct method you can run on any public site. No single check is definitive, so use two or three together.

Start by viewing the page source. Right-click and choose “View page source”, or press Ctrl and U together. Look at the file extensions in links and forms, since a PHP extension points to PHP, an ASPX extension to ASP.NET, and a JSP extension to Java. Clean, extension-free URLs often mean a framework is rewriting them, which tells you less on its own.

Next, check the response headers. Open your browser’s developer tools with F12, go to the Network tab, reload the page, click the first request, and read the response headers. An X-Powered-By line will sometimes name PHP or ASP.NET, and the Server line names the web server, such as Nginx or Apache.

Then look for tell-tale files and patterns. Comments, script paths and folder names in the source frequently reveal the platform. A path containing wp-content is a near-certain sign of WordPress, which runs on PHP.

Finally, use a technology detector. Browser extensions and online tools scan a page and report the likely stack, including the front-end framework and analytics. Treat the result as a strong hint rather than proof.

One caveat worth stating plainly. Front-end languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript are visible in the browser, so they are easy to confirm. Server-side languages like PHP, Python or Ruby run before the page reaches you, so you infer them from clues rather than reading them directly. Whether SQL counts as a programming language is a related but separate question, and it is about databases rather than page rendering.

The Languages That Actually Run Modern Business Sites

For most decisions you only need to recognise a handful of current languages and what each does.

HTML and CSS structure and style every page on the web. They are not programming languages in the strict sense, but well-formed HTML helps search engines read your content and good CSS keeps a site working on phones as well as desktops.

JavaScript adds interactivity: menus, form validation, sliders, live updates. It now powers entire web applications. The trade-off is speed, since heavy JavaScript slows page loads and drags down both experience and rankings.

PHP runs a large share of the web’s server-side logic, including WordPress, the platform behind most of the business sites ProfileTree builds. When you publish a post or submit a form, PHP runs on the server and builds the HTML sent back.

Python is the default for artificial intelligence, data analysis and automation. Teams use it for customer segmentation and reporting, and it is usually the first language SMEs meet in AI training.

SQL queries the data your business already holds, from sales records to analytics, so you can answer questions like which products earn the most.

Java sits alongside these for larger applications, powering e-commerce backends and enterprise integrations where scale matters. For most UK and Irish SMEs the language question never really arises here, because the decision gets made at platform level instead, and the trade-offs are set out in this guide to choosing an ecommerce build.

Here is Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree, on why this matters for owners rather than just developers: “Business owners don’t need to write code, but they do need to recognise what’s running under their site. Knowing that WordPress means PHP, or that a slow page often traces back to unmanaged JavaScript, changes the conversations you have with your developer and the decisions you make about your budget.”

Choosing the Right Platform for Your Own Site

For most businesses, the choice is not between historical languages but between platforms built on them. WordPress, running on PHP with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, powers a large portion of the web and suits most business sites because non-technical teams can manage content while developers extend it.

Custom development makes sense when a site needs something WordPress cannot do cleanly, such as a bespoke customer portal or heavy workflow automation. That might mean Python with Django, Node.js with React, or Laravel on PHP. It costs more upfront and buys an exact fit. If speed and search visibility are the priority, the technical layer decides how well any platform ranks, whichever route you take.

AI coding assistants have changed the day-to-day of development, generating code from plain descriptions and catching errors faster. They speed the work up, but do not replace judgement about architecture, security and business fit.

FAQs

A short round-up of the questions people ask most about early code and how to spot it today.