The shift from machine and assembly languages to higher-level programming languages was already being discussed in the 1940s — Konrad Zuse described Plankalkül, with John Mauchly’s ‘Short Code’ and Glennie’s ‘Autocode’ as comparable efforts. A few years on came the still-familiar Lisp, COBOL, and others. But what was the first practically and widely adopted high-level language, first specified in 1954 under the leadership of IBM’s John Backus? It remains in real use today in high-performance computing and in benchmarking supercomputer performance.

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Answer to yesterday’s question - “kaizen”, meaning “change for better”. Looking it up online will result in a numerous images of kaizen cycles for improvement. However, they all can be generalised into a logic of identification and analysis of the situation and issues, which should lead into creating solutions. Solutions themselves must be tested, verified analytically, and either standardised or reviewed for next iteration for continuous improvement.