This is a paper by Donald Knuth and his student Luis Trabb Pardo, and the published version has a more readable reprint: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-491650-0.50019-8" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-491650-0.50019-8</a> (without paywall: <a href="http://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-491650-0.50019-8" rel="nofollow">http://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-491650-0...</a>). See also someone's blog post: <a href="https://gregorias.github.io/2014/11/22/early-high-level-programming-languages.html" rel="nofollow">https://gregorias.github.io/2014/11/22/early-high-level-prog...</a><p>There's also a video version of this paper: <a href="https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102622137" rel="nofollow">https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10262213...</a> — This is a nice talk (~80 minutes followed by ~30 minutes of Q&A) that Donald Knuth gave on 2003-December-03 at the Computer History Museum. This paper was reprinted with corrections/updates as pages 1 to 93 of "Selected Papers on Computer Languages" (the fifth volume of Knuth's collected papers), and the talk was given shortly after this book came out, so he spoke about the first chapter of the book.<p>The clever idea here is to illustrate (very) early programming languages from their first decade (roughly 1947 to 1957), by writing the same program ("TPK") in each of them. A while ago I added a little bit about it to the lede of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TPK_algorithm&oldid=992083216" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TPK_algorithm&old...</a><p>What it reveals is that many ideas of programming languages that we now consider obvious in fact took a long time and many people to be developed. The early programming languages did not look at all like languages have looked, more or less, since 1958 (when both ALGOL and LISP were introduced).<p>> <i>This talk will discuss contributions of Zuse (1945), Goldstine and von Neumann (1946), Curry (1948), Mauchly et al (1949), Burks (1950), Wheeler (1951), Rutishauser (1951), Böhm (1951), Glennie (1952), Hopper et al (1953), Laning and Zierler (1953), Brooker (1954), Kaminynin and Ljubimskiy (1954), Ershov (1955), Grems and Porter (1955), Elsworth et al (1955), Blum (1956), Perlis et al (1956), Katz et al (1956), Bauer and Samelson (1956), Melahn et al (1956), as well as the prototype of FORTRAN developed by Backus et al from 1954 to 1957. At least a dozen of these efforts will be illustrated by showing how a particular procedure called the TPK algorithm might have been coded at the time.</i>