John Mauchly's Short Code idea and William Schmitt's implementations for BINAC and UNIVAC explored whether mathematical problems could be expressed in a compact interpreted notation rather than hand-written machine instructions.
Before leading FORTRAN, John Backus built Speedcoding for the IBM 701, an interpretive system that made floating-point scientific programming easier while exposing the performance cost of abstraction.
Betty Holberton's UNIVAC sort-merge generator took file specifications and produced the program needed to perform sorting and merging, an early demonstration that computers could help write programs.
Grace Hopper and colleagues at Remington Rand developed A-0 in the early 1950s, helping shift programming from manually arranging low-level instructions toward systems that could assemble reusable routines automatically.