What is a programming LANGUAGE?

Have you ever heard a foreign nationals speak in a foreign language, and you couldn't understand what was being said between or among them?

Maybe it was a romantic couple, talking to each other in sweet phrases, or a group of people who seemed angry at each other, but no matter how you tried, you just couldn't understand what they were saying.

To understand them, you first have to understand their language. The only language they can communicate with.

Computers do the same thing, they speak in a foreign language that only computers understand. They speak in a language of 1's and 0's. A language known as binary (bits & bytes) or machine code.

Computers speak in 1's and 0's?

The same way that the Chinese, mandarin or Icelandic language has different alphabetical letters as compared to the English language. Computers also have a different letters and numbers as compared to the English language

Below is a table comparing English language to binary.

To accomplish effective communication between computers and human beings, Computers have what i would call an "inbuilt dictionary" to translate English to binary in order for them to understand.

There are three main English to computer dictionaries: ASCII, UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format - 8 bit) & UTF-16 (Unicode Transformation Format - 16 bit) that different computers use in the world.

Why programming languages were invented.

1's and 0's are complex to understand for a regular human, and combining them in certain ways, making sure not to miss a 1 or a 0 in any scenario to create a single letter, number or a symbol is absolutely tedious, not to imagine writing an entire essay using 1's and 0's alone.

Programming languages were invented to simplify things. Instead of writing 3 entire pages of 1's and 0's to represent just a single paragraph in the English language, programming languages do all this heavy lifting for use. Allowing us to write a few lines of code, and a dedicated translator known as a compiler or interpreter can convert all these lines into 1's and 0's while we laze off.

The impact of not having programming languages

Without programming languages, computers would only understand each other and information would still be scattered globally. Only a few individuals would actually understand 1's and 0's, and they would be like supreme individuals who control information flow around the world.

Furthermore, Netflix, internet browsers, social media, video apps like TikTok or YouTube, and the internet wouldn't exist. Remember that cat video you liked, without programming languages, there wouldn't be a cat video to like, we would still be stuck in the 1800's era. In short, there would be limited information and a limited flow of ideas.

Program + Language = Programming Language

Just like how a "printed school program" plastered on the notice board communicates with the students, on matters concerning which classes to attend, what extra curricular activities are to be chosen and who the teachers are for each class.

A computer program instructs the computer what to do, e.g.: what to write to the screen, when to move the character in a video game, what to do if you press next on a TV remote and many more every-day things we do without thinking too much into it.

Basically, a programming language is a language designed to instruct the computer. A language to give a program the computer so that it can do tasks.

Unlike regular languages where two or more people, or even one person speaks for different reasons: emotional reasons, intellectual reasons, validation reasons, we speak to a computer in programming language to instruct it (to give it a program to follow), we do not speak it for any other reasons beyond that.

How many programming languages are there?

There are many programming languages, between 250 to 2,500. I know, there are too many to understand in a lifetime.

However, we can categorize them based on how close they are to the machine hardware, which basically means they are based on how complex and time-consuming they are to write.

1. Machine code: Specific to the processor, consists of 0s and 1s, directly understood by the CPU.

2. Low-level languages: Closer to machine code, less portable, offer more control (e.g., Assembly language).

3. High-level languages: Human-readable, independent of specific hardware, require translation (e.g., Python, Java, C++)

Please do further reading on the levels of programming languages in your own time, you will get much more insight.

The most popular programming languages are: JavaScript, python, Java, C++, C, Kotlin, Swift. These are used in widely by majority of the developers in the world and are much easier to understand and have a wider community support.

Examples of how to write in different programming Languages:

1. Python-programming language:

print("hello")

1. C-programming language:

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
  printf("hello\n");
  return 0;
}Html programming language

1. HTML programming language:

<body>
hello
</body>

As you can see from the code snippets above, displaying in C has more lines of code than displaying the same thing in c.

\You don't need to understand the lines of code for now.*

However, can you believe that the computer still does not understand programming languages? I know right! they should understand this complex-looking code, but they totally don't.

And that's why special programs known as compilers and interpreters are used to convert the code we write into machine code - the language that the computer understands.

We'll talk more about compilers and interpreters in another post.