What Is Programming?

History of Programming:

History is full of fortunate and unfortunate events. One of these fortunate events for computer science is the invention of programming language. During the years of World War II, to be precise in the years between 1943 and 1945, the world’s first programming language ‘plankalkul’ was developed by a German legend Konrad Zuse but not implemented till 1998, the year Saving Private Ryan released. In true sense, shortcode proposed by John Mauchly in 1949 is considered to be the first high-level programming language, but it had to be translated into machine code before execution which made it a very slow programming language in terms of processing speed.

What is programming?

Let’s begin our discussion by understanding the meaning of programming. The word ‘programming’ is defined as the process of instructing or learning by means of an instructional program in Merriam Webster Dictionary of the English language. Now the obvious question which pops up in our mind is what is a program then? Let me define what is a program in simple language, A program is a set of instructions (may or may not take any input) which is designed to perform a certain task by using a computer. Basically, a program is a medium to talk to a system. This medium (program) can be written in different styles or ways, and these styles or ways are called programming language and programming languages can be loosely classified into two classes: low level and high-level programming language.

Low-level vs High-level Programming Language:

We often hear two terms when we study the classification of programming languages which are high level and low-level programming languages. Let’s understand what exactly makes a language low level or high level? The answer is the simplicity of understanding the code for a developer or a programmer. Low-level programming languages are used to write programs for a specific architecture and hardware of a particular type of computer. Low-level languages are closer to the binary language, which makes the language hard to understand for a programmer, as a result, it becomes a hectic job to debug. Some examples of low-level languages are assembly language and machine code. On the contrary, high-level programming languages are actually designed in such a way that they become closer to the human language. That is why high-level languages are easy to code, easy to understand, and most importantly, easy to debug. C/C++, java, python, go all these celebrated languages are high-level languages.

Which type of Programming language should you learn?

It is a very common question among neophytes which type of language or exactly which language I should learn? Unfortunately, there is no obvious answer anyone could tell for this question. Different programming languages have their importance in respective fields. For example, for a hardware guy, low-level programming languages are necessary; on the other side, for a software developer, high-level programming languages are highly appreciated. So in conclusion, if we say it depends, then on what does it depend? It depends on your area of interest. One have to choose a programming language to study according to their need and field. There is no absolute answer my dear! 

Author: Dipanjan Nayak