Programming Languages

In this class we will learn a bit about programming languages, addressing topics such as its:

• Concept;
• Importance;
• Degree of abstraction;

What is a programming language?

A programming language is a method of communicating with the computer, a way of "telling" the computer precisely what you want it to do.

By mastering a programming language, you can create programs.
A program can be seen as a step by step "manual", that tells the computer what to do.

Just like a common language, a programming language contains syntactic and semantic rules. It means that it has rules so your code will be written correctly and make sense to the computer.

Some examples of a programming language are:

• C
• C++
• C#
• Java
• Python
• Javascript
• Lua
• among others...

The programming language that you will study in this course will be the C language. 😄

Before the invention of programming languages, programming already existed. However, programmers had to know all the details of the hardware where the code would run in order to make the program work. In other words, the time and difficulty to program in the past were much, much higher.

The creation of programming languages allowed, among other things:

• Ease of learning;
• Greater productivity;
• Creating more complex programs;
• A greater degree of abstraction for the programmer;

What is abstraction?

The abstraction of a programming language can be understood as to how easy it is to learn, so there are two types of abstraction:

• low level: machine language (language difficult to understand, in which the programmer needs to know the details of the hardware).

• high level: natural language (language easy to understand, similar to what we use in everyday life).

For example, compare the two code snippets respectively in Assembly and Python:

As you can see, writing in Python is much more like the language we use every day.

At this point you must be thinking: why do people use machine language then?

The answer is that the more the programming language looks like ours, the longer it takes the computer to translate it into machine language.

Now you know what a programming language is and how important it is to the programmer