Thanks for the comment.

This is a nuance of the article. A formal syntax, with formal semantics, wasn't usefully available for describing a sequence of computational steps, at that time. Competing proposals were put forth around the same time, with Turing's becoming better adopted than Zuse's.

For a long time, a computer wasn't thought of as being re-programmable, or if it was, this was accomplished by manually rewiring banks of circuits. There was lots of work on computation prior to WWII, but the distinction between "program" and "data" was still an embryonic concept at this point.

The idea that a computer could use data as its own instructions dove-tailed with the need to formalize algorithms in such a way that they could be represented as data (i.e. eliminate the requirement for manually rewiring the machine). Before this point, there was no use for a "program" since there wasn't anywhere to "put it."

The article starts with "The very first attempt to devise an algorithmic language...but the proposal never attained the consideration it deserved."

The date listed is 1945, after the end of WWII. However, I was under the impression this was already being attempted during WWII.