Sunday, November 17, 2013

History of Computer Science: It's All About the Languages

It's no doubt that programing languages are important! Guess how many programming languages exist today. 50? 100? 500? Hmmm, 1000? Nope! 1500? Higher! 2500?!? YES (well, close enough)! There are more than 2500 documented programming languages. Simply, a programming language is a language that is used to communicate with computers. You've probably heard of at least one, if not more. Here is a list of a few of the ones I've heard: Java, C, C++, Python, Ruby, PHP, FORTRAN, Ada, Scheme, Lisp and this goes on! They're are so many of them but many of the newer languages are derived from the older ones. Let's talk about the different kinds of programming languages and some of the major developments.

Machine Language
Machine Language or machine code is the lowest-level programming language and it's the only language understood by computers. How do computers understand it? Well, a set of instructions that is made up of binary values is run by the computer's central processing unit (CPU). Above the machine language, there is the assembly language.

Assembly Language
Assembly languages are also low level languages but people can read them, unlike machine language which is almost impossible for humans to read. So how does a computer read assembly language? It can't. An assembler is used to convert the assembly language to machine language that the computer can understand. Assembly language use a mnemonic instead of numbers in order represent instructions. There are some disadvantages to using assembly languages though. First of all, it's still hard to understand. Secondly, assembly language is often machine depended where only a certain machine's CPU will be able to process the language.

High-Level Language
This language allows programers to write programs that are easily readable and are not dependent on a specific type of computer. It closely resembles the human languages. Again, how does a computer read this language? Well, a compiler or an interpreter is used to translate it into machine language. FORTRAN, COBOL, and ALGOL were created in the 1950's and were crucial to forming the foundation of future programming languages.

Programming languages are beautiful. If you would like to learn more about programming languages, then this page gives a great overview of some of the programming languages. 

Works Cited
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1 comment:

  1. Mari KaneshimaNovember 19, 2013 at 4:50 PM

    Hi Sindhu.

    This is a very good post about programming languages (from then to now). I love how you describe the three programming languages from the middle portion of your pyramid image from the top. These layers of the programming languages pyramid made me think of the timeline of programming languages before Java was built. Programming languages are amazing to have the experience in understanding the logic and the syntax. If you do not know how to learn programming languages, you will never have this kind of experience for future references. I like how you mentioned the major developments in each programming language, which is something I need to know about. Thank you for teaching me that.

    One suggestion into your post is to check for spelling/grammar/sentence structure errors in your post.

    This post is informative and readable, in a good way. Again, good work on your computer science history post. Keep up the good work!

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