The first programming languages designed to communicate instructions to a computer were written in the 1950s. An early high-level programming language to be designed for a computer was Plankalkül

between 1943 and 1945. However, it was not implemented until 1998 and 2000.

Another early programming language was devised by Grace Hopper in the US, called FLOW-MATIC.

Flow-Matic was a major influence in the design of COBOL

The language Fortran was developed at IBM in the mid 1950s, and became the first widely used high-level general purpose programming language.