All right: The History of Computers According to Mantis.
The very first computer language was written by a woman. Men outnumber women by a healthy margin today but, early on, women led the way. Computer programs originally had to be hand-coded in machine language and fed into the computer. One of these programmers realized, "why are we doing this when we can get the computer to do it for us?" So she hand-coded a program to assemble easier-to-read opcodes into machine language. Thus the first assembly language was born.
For years after that, assembly language compilers were written for every machine. The same assembly language program couldn't be moved from one computer to another (still the same today) and the programs were extremely hard to write.
So along comes somebody working on the IBM 360 (I think it was the 360--a very advanced machine for its day) and said, why don't we take this further? We have assembly language where the computer takes easy-to-remember opcodes (like MOV and XOR) and turns them into machine language. What if we designed a whole language that could be converted easily into machine language? Something easier to write and easier to edit? Fortran was born.
Fortran was the first real programming language. It was written primarily for scientists so they could encode their formulas and programs more easily (at the time, many still considered the computer to be a powerful calculator and little else). It was never expected to be ported to other languages. But the idea was a powerful one... you could write a program in a way that was easy for a human to follow and the computer could translate it. Fortran was ported to many other computers and became the first cross-platform language.
Other languages came after this. Some were targeted for specific tasks, other for specific computers. BASIC was designed as a simplified version of Fortran (to this day, they're relatively similar). Algol was the first one written with computer science in mind (remember: nobody knew anything about software engineering until after Fortran.) Pascal copied Algol, C was designed pulling good ideas from both of those, C#, Java, C++, Objective-C... they grew off that. Other languages like Python learned from a mix of those languages... but ultimately we owe it all to Grandfather Fortran.
Hope this helps.