What is a programming language❔

What is a programming language❔

Programming languages are the tools we use to express a set of detailed instructions for computers to follow. Thanks to programming languages, a programmer can implement a piece of software to run on a computer. This software can be a website, desktop app, mobile app, operating system, and not only. Over the years, thousands of different programming languages have been created and they fall into two different classifications: high-level and low-level.

Low-level and high-level programming languages

low-level

Low-level programming languages provide no abstraction from the hardware and are represented in 0 or 1, that is the binary code(machine instructions). Low-level languages are difficult for humans to read, but they are fast and offer total control over the code.

high-level

High-level programming languages are closer to humans, so they are easy to read. Moreover, the high-level programming languages, are also easy to write and maintain, and they are portable, namely, not designed to run on just one type of machine.

But what are these programming languages❔

There are many programming languages used for various purposes, and in this article, some will be analyzed.

C: the C programming language was developed in the early 1970s by Dennis M. Ritchie and Brian Kernighan, to be used in writing operating systems. Many later languages like Java, PHP, JavaScript, and many others, have borrowed syntax/features from the C language. C is one of the most powerful programming languages, and it allows direct access to memory and many low-level computer operations. Some examples of the use of C are in operating systems, text editors, network drivers, databases, languages compilers, language interpreters, and modern programs.

C++: the C++ language, developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in the mid-1980s, is a statically typed, compiled, general-purpose, case-sensitive language and extends C by adding objects to it while preserving the efficiency of C programs. C++ is also considered one of the fastest languages and it encapsulates high and low-level features. Thanks to C++ we can develop different types of secured and robust applications like operating systems, browsers, device drivers, database engines, embedded systems.

C#: C#(pronounce C sharp) was developed by Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft in 2000. It is a modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language, that enables developers to build many types of secure and robust applications that run in the .NET ecosystem. C# has a syntax similar to that of C and C++ and is often used for developing games and applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Python: Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language. It was developed by Guido Van Rossum in 1991, it uses an elegant syntax, making the programs easier to read. Moreover, Python is easily extended by adding new modules implemented in a compiled language such as C or C++, and it also comes with a large standard library that supports many programming tasks, such as connecting to web servers, searching text with regular expressions, reading and modifying files. Python, in the 2010s, became one of the most popular programming languages, thanks to the fields where it is used, like Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Data Mining, Software Development, 3D CAD Applications.

Java: Java is an object-oriented, class-based, concurrent, secured, and general-purpose programming language, developed by Sun Microsystem in the early 1990s. Java is also platform-independent, namely, the programs written in Java are converted to bytecode first, by Java compiler, and this bytecode can be run in any machine having Java runtime environment(JRE). Java is really popular and can be used to develop desktop applications, web applications, mobile applications, enterprise applications, games, and embedded systems.

JavaScript: JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich in 1995 and it is a lightweight, object-oriented programming language that is used by several websites for scripting webpages. There are three things that make JavaScript unique:

  1. Full-integration with HTML/CSS

  2. Simple things are done simply

  3. Support by all major browsers and enabled by default

It is also case-sensitive and follows the syntax and structure of the C language. JavaScript is a widely-used programming language, and using it, can be built websites, web servers, games, mobile applications, and also three-dimensional graphics.

Fortran: Fortran was the first important algorithmic language created in 1957 by an IBM, team led by John Backus. For the first time, Fortran made code comprehensible to people with expertise in fields other than computing, opening programming to mathematicians and scientists. Fortran is still in use more than 50 years after its creation, and is used in organizations such as weather forecasters, financial trading, and engineering simulations. Moreover, Fortran became very popular for high-performance computing, because it supports numerical analysis, scientific computation, high-performance computing on supercomputers, structured programming, object-oriented programming, and also generic programming.

This article is an overview of some programming languages, but there are many others, and you can check the complete index on TIOBE.