Overview of Programming Languages

What is a programming language anyway? A programming language is simply a notation for instructions given to the computer. Think of a programming language as a language in the real world. If you want to communicate with French people then you have to use the French language. A computer has its own language and you communicate to it through the different types programming languages.

Having difficulty communicating to a French person because of lack of French speaking skills is similar to having difficulty telling your computer what to do because of lack of programming skills. If you want to maximize the potential of computers then you should certainly learn a lot of programming.

Throughout time, programming languages have evolved. In the fifties, programming was done in very low level languages like FORTRAN and COBOL. In the sixties, programming was done mainly in BASIC. In the seventies, programming was in Prolog. In the eighties, ISO Pascal, PostScript, and the C languages were already being used. In the nineties, Java and VB take the center stage. In the new millennium, new programming languages like C# are being used. Programming has gone a long way since the low level languages to the high level languages of today. Low level languages are programming languages that closely resemble machine code, the code that a computer understands. The high level languages are programming languages that closely resemble human language.

There are certain pros and cons when programming in a low level versus a high level language. Normally, if a programming language is a low level one, computer programming is harder since the programmer has to communicate almost directly with the machine. The advantage of this is that the computer programmer can utilize as much potential from the hardware. In a high level programming language, although the programmer will not have much of a hard time, the hardware is almost not fully utilized.

This tutorial will guide you through the basics of programming languages. You will get a brief overview of how most of the programming languages work in the world today. You will not learn how to read and write machine code in this tutorial but you will understand how it works. You wouldn't want to understand how to program in 1's and in 0's anyway so forget about learning machine language! The programming languages that will be of interest to you after finishing this tutorial will be the higher level programming languages like Java, VB, and C#. These programming languages are also object oriented programming languages. You will learn more about this later on. The object oriented programming languages are also the most used programming languages in the world today.