Today, most programming languages use different types of structural paradigms (such as functions and object-oriented programming), but the easy-to-grasp syntax of BASIC, with its plain English ...

In the 1950s, the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper designed a language called FLOW-MATIC (a name whose badassery has yet to be outdone) that used plain-English-like commands such as IF ...

Fortran is the oldest commercial programming language, designed at IBM in the 1950s. And even though, for years, programmers have been predicting its demise, 64 years later it's still kicking ...

Thomas E. Kurtz with an early computer at Dartmouth in the early 1960s. He worked to make computers more accessible to all students, not just those in technical fields — a novel idea at the time.