A high-level programming language has a significant abstraction from the details of computer operation. It is designed to be easily understood by humans and for this reason they must be translated by another software. Unlike low-level programming languages, it may use natural language elements, or may automate (or even entirely hide) significant areas of computing systems, making the process of developing simpler and more understandable relative to a lower-level language. The amount of abstraction provided defines how "high-level" a programming language is.
The idea of a language automatically translatable into machine code, but nearer to human logic, was introduced in computer science in the 1950s, especially thanks to the work of John Backus (IBM), to whom it owes the first high-level language to have been widely circulated: Fortran. For this innovation Bakus received the Turing prize.
In the 1960s, high-level programming languages using a compiler were commonly called autocodes; examples are COBOL and Fortran. The first high-level programming language designed for computers was Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse. It was not implemented in his time, and his original contributions were, due to World War II, largely isolated from other developments, although it influenced Heinz Rutishauser's language Superplan (and to some degree also Algol).
The first really widespread high-level language was Fortran, a machine independent development of IBM's earlier Autocode systems. Algol, that was defined in 1958 by European and American committees of computer scientists, introduced recursion as well as nested functions under lexical scope - it was also the first language with a clear distinction between value and name-parameters and their corresponding semantics. Algol also introduced several structured programming concepts, such as the while-do and if-then-else constructs and its syntax was the first to be described by a formal method, Backus–Naur Form (BNF). During roughly the same period Cobol introduced records (also called structs) and Lisp introduced a fully general lambda abstraction in a programming language for the first time.