Types of programming languages | Software

Hi,

Lets get going further in to the basics of computers.

For those of you who are new to this blog, I recommend you to go through part - 1 of the basics before going ahead with this post.

Here is the link to part-1:

https://techspireme.blogspot.in/2018/04/basics-of-computers.html

We have already read from part 1 that Software is a set of applications.

Software is basically of two types:

1. System software: software required to start up the system i.e the Operating System software (by booting - a process named Boot Strap Loader loads the operating system from the Hard disk drive to the working memory RAM)

2. Application software: Software designed for a specific purpose that is a collection of programs. Application software always runs on the top of system software.
Examples of Application software are: word processors like notepad, wordpad
A suite of applications like MS Office
Media players (VLC etc) and many more.

System software is the base on which application software functions.

To develop software applications, we create, compile and execute programs (to perform a particular task). To create programs, we use programming languages.

Programming language is a language specific to computers that is used to create programs. It is a set of specifications and rules/syntax to create code that is understandable and process-able by the computer.

There are three types of programming languages.
1. Low Level Programming language: here the instructions and data are provided in low level i.e as a string of 0's and 1's.
Advantages: Fast execution as instructions are directly understandable by the computer/processor and can directly work with the system hardware.
Disadvantages: Hard to code


2. Middle Level Programming Language: here the task is a bit simplified for the coder. The instructions are provided with a set of keywords or mnemonics that perform a specific operation.
Example: STO A (to store value)
STO B
ADD A,B (to add A,B) etc.
Middle level programming is usually used to program microprocessors like the 8086 micro processor.
C language is a middle level language because it has both low level features like pointers and syntax that is English like (high level language feature).

3. High level Programming Language: the instructions here are written in a very user friendly manner in English like language.
Ex. Java, C++

These are the Types of programming languages.

As you can infer from the above diagram, as we come down from low level to high level, the complexity of programming decreases, also the performance becomes low but from programmer point of view, it gets more user friendly and comparitively simpler to code.

Some interesting facts:

The first ever computer programmer (1843) was a woman named Ada Lovelace.

Plankankul, a programming language for engineering purposes was the first high level programming language created between 1942-1945 by Konrad Zuse.

In 1951 Corrado Bohm created the first high level language with an associated compiler for his Ph.D thesis.

In 1956, FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) was the first ever commercially available language.

Simula is the first object oriented programming language. It was designed for simulations.