There is a chicken and an egg.
 There is a meaning to life.
 There is the big bang theory.
 There is a compiler number 1.

''A1. That would most likely be John Backus' FORTRAN in 1954.''

''A2. The A-0 compiler by Grace Hopper, predecessor of COBOL, in 1952.''

If you find the answer to where the first compiler was built from, maybe you have the answers to life?

I remember reading that the idea evolved gradually. There was kind of an incremental leap from assembler to higher-level languages. GraceHopper is generally credited with a lot of the work. She wanted to bring programming "to the masses" - more so than most of her colleagues seemed interested in at the time.