A list of early programming languages. Also links to a paper by Knuth and Pardo in 1976.
There were many languages that pre-dated Fortran. This series is based on the white paper by Knuth and Pardo published in 1976, “The early development of programming languages”. In this paper the authors describe 20 languages, and use a generic program “TPK” described using ALGOL-60 to illustrate how each language would be formed.
Here’s another early language (1955), from the other side of what was the iron curtain: ПП-BESM.
Described in A.P. Ershov’s 1959 book “Programming Programme for the BESM Computer”, ПП-BESM, was a language implemented for the BESM computer, one of the first large scale soviet computers. Started in 1954, after a lecture on ПП-1 a precursor language, it was finished by 1955.