Have you ever heard of Plankalkül? If not, you‘re likely not alone. This obscure programming language from the 1940s pioneered key concepts that shaped modern coding, yet still remains relatively unknown. Created by a visionary German engineer named Konrad Zuse, Plankalkül was decades ahead in anticipating features we now take for granted.
In this guide, I‘ll chronicle the fascinating history of Plankalkül – how one man developed such advanced ideas so early, why his language didn‘t gain traction initially, and its eventual rediscovery and influence. You‘ll see through Plankalkül‘s story how today‘s programming capabilities didn‘t materialize suddenly, but rather built gradually on previous unsung innovations that are worth learning from.
Overview
Here‘s a quick flyby overview before we dive deeper:
What was Plankalkül?
- First high-level programming language (designed starting 1938-45)
- Created by Konrad Zuse for his mechanical computers
- Included major features like data types, subroutines, conditionals
- Compiler/interpreter not implemented during Zuse‘s time
Why does it matter?
- Pioneered core elements of modern languages decades prior
- Conceptual predecessor to widely used languages (FORTRAN, C)
- Validated by later compiler construction efforts (1990s+)
What I‘ll cover:
- Origins – who created Plankalkül and why
- How it technically works – data, syntax, structure
- Comparison to early languages of its era
- Plankalkül‘s rediscovery and impact on future languages
Next we‘ll rewind and reveal the whole story of this unsung pioneer from the start…
The Mind Behind the Language
Our journey begins with Konrad Zuse – that brilliant visionary I mentioned who devised Plankalkül in the first place. As a German civil engineering student in the 1930s, Zuse aimed to automate tedious numerical calculations for his work. To pull this off, he started constructing electromechanical computing machines years before electronic computers emerged.
Fun fact: Zuse literally built his first prototypes in his parents‘ living room!
You can imagine as an ambitious young engineer, Zuse was thrilled at the prospect of reducing hours of numerical drudgery into automated calculation in seconds. This drive towards effortless computation was the genesis leading Zuse to push far beyond existing technology of his time.
By 1941, he had progressed to building the Z3 – the first reliably working, Turing complete, programmable electromechanical computer. The hardware was unprecedented…but then Zuse began pondering something even more groundbreaking.
What if these computers could be programmed using human language-like instructions rather than just 1‘s and 0‘s? Compared to directly coding absolute machine operations in bits, this could massively ease software creation. Of course this exactly the approach all our modern languages take – but keep in mind no such thing existed in the 1940s!
Yet this is the avant-garde concept Konrad Zuse started developing for his machines under the label Plankalkül. Let‘s examine next how he brought these ideas to life…
Inside Plankalkül: A Technical Marvel
As Zuse imagined Plankalkül in the early 1940s, it incorporated a remarkable spectrum of capabilities matching what programmers rely on today:
Data Structures
- Integer, floating point, and Boolean datatypes
- Multidimensional arrays
- Composite record and tuple structures
Modularity
- Subprograms – reusable named blocks of code
- Functions – take input parameters and return values
Logic and Control Flow
- Conditionals (IF statements)
- Loops/iteration
Algorithms
- Mathematical and Boolean operators
- Array manipulation
Input/Output
- Reading and writing data
This may sound like Programming 101 now, but in WWII-era tech, Plankalkül was basically sorcery!
To pull this off, Zuse developed a two-dimensional syntax using rows and columns to encode instructions. Here‘s a simplified glimpse:
| Type | Name | Operation |
|---|---|---|
| Input | X | 15 |
| Temp | SUM | |
| Output | COUNT |
| IF | X > 10 | SUM + X => SUM COUNT + 1 => COUNT |
|---|
The vertical orientation and special symbols distinguished variables, constants, conditions, etc. without requiring lots of punctuation.
Overall, Zuse designed Plankalkül to handle engineering and scientific goals – number crunching, matrix math, statistics. But the concepts scaled to general purpose business and system programming as well.
Sadly wartime devastation prevented Zuse from ever fully implementing his ideas on working hardware. So how did Plankalkül compare then to other contemporaneous languages?
Contrast With the First Mainstream Languages
Most programming histories rightfully highlight FORTRAN (1954) as the first widespread, compiled imperative language. But we can now see Zuse‘s Plankalkül pursued almost identical goals a full decade prior!
How did key aspects differ between these languages both aiming to simplify software coding? View some major comparisons in parallel:
| Feature | Plankalkül | FORTRAN |
|---|---|---|
| Created | 1941-45 | 1954 |
| Primary Data types | Boolean, integer, float, array | Integer, real, complex, logical, character, array |
| Structure | 2-dimensional | Linear text statements |
| Compiled/Interpreted | Not implemented then | Compiled |
| Usage Domain | Engineering/scientific | Scientific/numeric |
FORTRAN‘s cleaner syntax and crucially, its compiler implementation clearly eased adoption compared to Plankalkül lingering in theoretical description. However, we see Plankalkül firmly establish concepts core to FORTRAN first.
In many ways, Plankalkül directly foreshadowed what mainstream programming would become. As the very first high-level language designed, it set precedents FORTRAN and later entries like COBOL (1959) iterated on.
So will we never escape Plankalkül‘s shadow? Well, at one point…it almost disappeared completely!
Plankalkül‘s Rediscovery and Legacy
Given his resource constraints during and after WWII, Zuse focused on commercializing his computer hardware designs rather than publicizing the half-baked Plankalkül concepts. With Germany‘s post-war economy in crisis, Zuse struggled for years to simply find work lecturing on computing topics.
It was tragically not until 1972 that Zuse‘s complete Plankalkül work finally received formal publication – far too late to influence language development by then. This forefather of programming sat largely unknown for decades even as its descendants dominated the software world!
Fortunately in recent times, historians have resuscitated Plankalkül from obscurity by analyzing Zuse‘s recovered notes:
- Books and journal papers covered Plankalkül‘s function and place in history
- Enthusiasts implemented interpreters modeling Zuse‘s specification
- Most critically, Joachim Hohmann‘s 1998 dissertation work constructed the first full Plankalkül compiler – proving feasibility Zuse missed initially
Thanks to such efforts, today we can properly memorialize Plankalkül as the breakthrough vision that seeded many fruits now fundamental to our computing landscape:
- High-level language abstractions
- Separation of software code from hardware
- Structured programming concepts
- Compiler/interpreter execution
- Domain-specific languages
While nameless, we owe this seminal body of ideas to Konrad Zuse‘s Plankalkül…our genre‘s forgotten grandfather language.
My hope is this glimpse has intrigued you to dig deeper into Plankalkül‘s story and properly appreciate its huge contribution. Next time you write a loop, conditional, or function in JavaScript, C#, Python or any language – spare a thought for unsung pioneers like Plankalkül who made that magic possible!
