Ada was most definitely not the first programming language; it only appeared around 1990, and shows influences from ALGOL, Pascal, and Modula-2.

The predecessor to the B language was a language called BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language), which was stripped down and modified syntactically to make B, and then became the basis of C. Some have argued that the development of languages has advanced along the letters of the original "BCPL" acronym: first B, then C, then the "P" for "plus" in C++, then, if you take the mirror image of "L", it looks like a "J", for Java.