Introduction Programming Languages

Before starting up with what a programming language is let me tell you why it is required.

To interact with people we need a language like English, Dutch, Hindi etc however computer understands none of the above languages or any human spoken language.

Now the question is why we need to interact with computers. The short answer is to make computers perform a different task. Now, yet another question that arises here is why we need computers to do our work are humans not capable enough to do it? The answer is no, humans can perform the same task but computers are more efficient and faster as compared to humans.

Now let's get back to how we can interact with computers, the short answer is via 0s and 1s because computers understand binary language. But again to make the computer perform the simplest task we need to write a lot of 0s and 1s and this will make every simple task tedious so scientists came up with an intermediate language called Assembly language. However, even Assembly language was not very easy to understand the world's first programming language was built to solve the issue.

But now the question arises is do computers understand programming language? The answer is no, computers don't understand programming languages so a compiler was built to solve the issue which translates programming language to binary language. Now, most of my readers might ask why can't we use a compiler to directly compile English, the answer is English is a language whose meaning changes with the change in the stress pattern, word arrangement and punctuation marks.

This is a short intro to how programming languages work on my next blog I will tell you how a compiler works.