Programming Language
Programming Language a way to communicate with our machine to process some instructions and produce the expected output. That’s what I referred its definition when I started my journey as a programmer, but my enthusiasm towards it made myself asking several questions such as
- How programmers back then communicated with computers?
- Does their programming language similar as today languages?
- What was the first programming language?
- And where we are now today?
So, let's explore some answers to above questions as we read this article.
When first digital electronic computer was invented, programmers used to communicate with machines using binary instructions i.e. converted English or Mathematical information to binary according to ascii sheet. Let’s assume that how hard for them to remember or convert a page of instruction set, which laid the path for a simplified language for communicating with computer by computer-scientists.
Introduction of Low-Level Language
Back in 1940’s computer-scientists came up with little abstracted languages from what machines understand these are referred as low-level languages. According to Wikipedia
“A low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer’s instruction set architecture — commands or functions in the language map that are structurally similar to processor’s instructions. Generally, this refers to either machine code or assembly language.”
These decreased the effort of programmers a little but everything has its own pros and cons let’s discuss few here.
- These language files or programs are not portable.
- They have own syntax set for every machine architecture so these are more error prone.
- They are referred as “close to hardware languages”, and are processed fast to provide output.
- They don’t require any compilers or interpreters to convert to machine compatible language.
Introduction to High-Level Languages
Even after picture of low-level language there are many problems for the coders because they have to be very careful in writing programs because every syntax is architecture specific and they have to remember symbolic language, this problem made computer-scientists or some programmers build a layer of abstraction around machine language by building a tool called compiler or interpreter independent to language they have created referred as high-level language today. According to Wikipedia
In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language elements, be easier to use, or may automate (or even hide entirely) significant areas of computing systems (e.g. memory management), making the process of developing a program simpler and more understandable than when using a lower-level language.
First let’s see when it started and where are we now...
Yes! now we have some natural language used programming languages but they do have some pros and cons
- They are programmer friendly providing high level of abstraction from machine language.
- Less error prone, as they are easy to find and debug errors if any.
- These are less efficient and have high latency compared to low-level language.
Conclusion
On closing note, I love to sincerely thank all computer scientists and other programmers who made communicating with our machine with ease of natural language and like to mention that we would also have done the same 0’s and 1’s without development of computing power such as memory processing and storage.
References:
Images: Custom Made, Google Images.
Research based on wiki and other sites.
