Programming Language

To communicate with a person, we need a specific language, similarly to communicating with computers, we also need a language to communicate with computers, and this language is called Programming language. Now, before learning the programming language, let's understand what is a language in simple terms? Language is a mode of communication that is used to share or exchange ideas, opinions, or feelings. For communication between two things, we need a language that is used by both the communicators.

What Is a Programming Language?

Programming language is an interface between man and machine by which we can communicate with computers. Our instruction to perform an action is written in a language that the computer can understand. So, a programming language is a computer language that is used by a programmer to communicate with computers. Programming language is a set of instructions written in any specific language either high-level or low-level language (C, C++, Java, Python, R, etc.) to perform a specific task.

1. Low-level programming language

Low-level language is a machine-dependent programming language that understands only the 0s and 1s. The processor does not require any compiler or interpreter to run the language, so the programs are written in low-level language run very fast.

Low-level language is divided into two parts:

Machine language (ML) is a type of low-level programming language. ML is also called object code or machine code.

This represents the set of instructions in a symbolic and human-understandable form. This uses an assembler to convert the assembly language to machine language.

2. High-level programming language

A high-level language is designed for developing user-friendly software programs and websites. High-level language requires a compiler or interpreter to translate the written program into machine language to execute the program. HL language is easy to read, write, and maintain.

High-level programming language includes Cobol, FORTRAN, Pascal, LISP, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, and Python programming language.

These are of three types:

This is derived from structured programming and based upon the procedure call concept. POP divides a program into small procedures called routines or functions.

This helps programmers to easily track the program flow and code can be reused in different parts of the program. Some examples are Basic, C, FORTRAN, Pascal, etc.

OOP language is based upon the objects, programs are divided into small parts called objects. OOP is used to implement real-world entities like inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction, etc. in the program to make the program efficient, re-usable, and easy to use. Object-oriented programming language is easier and faster to execute, modify, debug, as well as maintain.

Natural language is a part of human languages such as Hindi, English, French, and Japanese. This is used by machines to understand, manipulate, and interpret human language. Natural language is used by developers to perform tasks such as translation, automatic summarization, relationship extraction, Named Entity Recognition (NER), and topic segmentation. The major advantage of NL (natural language) is that it helps users to ask questions in any subject and directly respond within seconds.

3. Middle-level programming language

Middle-level programming language (MLPL) lies between the low-level programming language (LLPL) and high-level programming language (HLPL). This is also known as the intermediate programming language and pseudo-language.

This supports the features of high-level programming. ML programming language is user-friendly and closely related to machine language and human languages. Some Examples are C, C++, languages.

There are many programming languages available. Some most widely used programming languages are Python, R, Java, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, PHP, Elixir, Go, Dart, Pony Julia, etc.