@zkat I had to look this up (not because I didn't trust you, but because I remembered this wrong, just to be clear) and it's always fascinating to me how basically, within very few years we got from handwritten machine code to something like Algol that is already very close to what we're still writing today.

And just a handful (okay, couple of handfuls) of people as well.

@zkat While we're at it: last year I found out about Address (1955). Relatively unknown outside of Russia, but the first language that came up with the idea of... memory locations that hold memory addresses. It's a form of proto-pointers, nearly a decade before PL/1. Cyrillic syntax though, which makes it kind of hard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_programming_language

Invented by Kateryna Yushcenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kateryna_Yushchenko_(scientist)

@zkat oooh, that is cool, thanks!