History bits
1930s: Alonzo Church and Stpehen Cole Kleene developed the lambda calculus which some consider to be the world's first programming language.
However, it was intended to model computation rather than to describe algorithms to a computer system.
1940s: Konrad Zuse desgned Plankalkül, the first (real?) programming languauge - but was only implemented 1998.
1954-1957: John Backus and his team of
IBM researchers develop Fortran, the first widely known and successful
hih-level programming language.
ALGOL 58, an attempt to develop a universal computer language.
John McCarthy (MIT) developed
Lisp, based on the
lambda calculus.