1. Overview

Today, we have several programming languages and we should have learned or started learning at least one of them to develop a software application.

Did we ever try to understand what exactly is a programming language?

In this article, let's try to understand what we mean by a programming language.

2. Content

In general, language is a mode of communication, which can be used to share ideas and opinions with others, through a common language that both understand.

How about communication with a computer, which doesn't understand human languages?

Computers only understand 0's and 1's, which we call machine code or binary code. But, we humans can only understand the words we speak and write, which have a specific meaning.

So, we have a gap between what we understand and what computers understand. The solution to bridging this gap is a Programming Language.

2.1. What is a Programming language?

Programming language is a form of computer language that a programmer uses to communicate with a computer, in the form of instructions, to perform a specific task.

The language can be C, C++, Java, PHP, Phyton, or any other language.

Every programming language consists of a set of defined statements using simple words, symbols that humans understand.

All such instructions are translated to machine code, which acts as instructions to computers, in a language that they understand.

Finally, in short, a programming language is made up of a series of simple words and symbols, that serves as a bridge that allows humans to translate their thoughts into instructions, that computers can understand.

http://media.randomcodez.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/what-is-a-programming-language-2.png

Here is an example with a sample program, which gets translated to binary code, and gets processed by a computer to return the output.

int i = 1;
if(i==1) {
	echo 'Hello World';
}

2.2. Types of Programming Languages

Type of language	Details
Low-level programming languages	These are closer to machine code, so difficult to learn and implement But, they have some advantages like fast processing precise control over how the computer functions Some of the popular languages today are:
High-level programming languages	These consist of simple words that humans use to communicate with others every day like class, main, if, else, switch, for, request, response, and so on. These take more time than low-level languages, as they take some time to translate instructions into machine code. However, computers have become so powerful these days, which has reduced the processing time between low-level and high-level languages to just milliseconds. So, high-level languages are the go-to option for faster implementation these days. Some of the popular languages today are C++, PHP, Java, Python, Javascript, etc.,

3. Conclusion

We should be able to understand what a programming language is, how it works, and the types of programming languages.