See also the paper by Knuth and his student Luis Trabb Pardo, "The Early Development of Programming Languages" (1976) -- its long story ends in 1957, the year this speculation is about. There's a typewritten version available online (e.g. at http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/stanford/cs_techRepor...) (TeX didn't exist yet), but a nicely typeset (and slightly updated) version occupies pages 1 to 93 of Knuth's Selected Papers on Computer Languages (the fifth volume of Knuth's collected papers).
The many programming languages/systems described in that article go by various names like "automatic coding" and whatnot. For example, Burks in 1950 used "intermediate program language" (as something above the "internal program language"). (The PDF linked above actually uses "intermediate programming language" but the more recent printed book uses "intermediate program language" so that's probably correct.)
I confess I haven't properly read the Knuth and Trabb-Pardo article yet... maybe there's a historical mention of the actual term "programming language" in there somewhere.
The many programming languages/systems described in that article go by various names like "automatic coding" and whatnot. For example, Burks in 1950 used "intermediate program language" (as something above the "internal program language"). (The PDF linked above actually uses "intermediate programming language" but the more recent printed book uses "intermediate program language" so that's probably correct.)
I confess I haven't properly read the Knuth and Trabb-Pardo article yet... maybe there's a historical mention of the actual term "programming language" in there somewhere.