
100th anniversary of Konrad Zuse: creator of the first programming language - mojuba
http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse/Konrad_Zuse/
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buddycasino
The name of said language being "Plankalkül" _. Which is the best name for a
programming language. Ever.

_ ("Plan Calculus" doesn't quite capture it)

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eru
What makes you think so? Do you understand German in general?

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qwzybug
He was also one of the first to articulate the notion of the computable world.
Wolfram and crew owe Zuse an intellectual debt (though as far as I know he
doesn't appear in the footnotes to A New Kind of Science, big surprise).

Zuse should be a folk hero for anyone interested in the notion of a discrete,
computable physics.

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iuguy
Hmmm... In 1843 Ada Lovelace wrote a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers
with Babbage's Analytical Engine, and is generally considered to be the first
computer program. Having said that the early 19th century Jacquard looms used
punch cards for pattern instructions. Hollerith expanded on this with his 1890
census.

Zuse's language was never implemented in his lifetime. You could argue the
same about Lovelace's algorithm, but not about Turing machines.

Zuse certainly developed the first programmable computer (albeit an
electromechanical one, the first digital one was the UK Colossus a year later)
and it's certainly an amazing achievement, but not the first programming
languages.

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ErrantX
Wikipedia has more: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse>

It terms it the first _high level_ non-von Neumann programming language.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl>

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phreeza
One shouldn't forget that he was a Nazi collaborator, used his skills to
design bombs at Henschel among other things, and was financed by the Nazi
regime right till the end of the war.

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david927
He was a German during the war. There's a difference. I think you're thinking
of people like Henry Ford and Thomas Watson (founder of IBM).

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tomjen3
There is also the difference that he properly didn't have much choice.

Thomas Watson on the other hand wasn't forced to make the punchcards the nazis
used to run their census and kill the jews; he did it very, very willingly.

And Ford was given a fucking medal by Hitler.

