A programming language is an artificial language that has been designed in order to issue commands to a machine. A computer programming language is used to issue instructions to a computer. Programming languages have been in existence since the advent of computers. They have been used in the development of computer information systems that are used in many businesses today. The computer programming language can undergo execution directly while in the form of the manufacturer’s numerical format. At this stage, they are referred to as machine language. They can also be executed in assembly language where the machine language has been substituted to an understandable format. They can also be executed into some higher-level language (Louden, & Lambert, 2011).
Assembly and machine languages are referred to as low-level languages because the computer programmer is required to manage all of the computer’s data storage and operation features. On the other hand, high level computer programming languages shield the programmers from managing the features of data operations and storage. Instead, these programming languages provide notations that are easily read and written by computer programmers (Maloney et al., 2010).
There are different types of computer programming languages. There are procedural (structured) computer programming languages and unstructured computer programming languages. Structured computer programming languages allows the programmer to give commands to a computer programming language so that they follow some give steps when performing a function. Structured programming languages have logical flows. On the other hand, unstructured computer programming languages do not follow a procedure but follow constraints. Examples of structured computer programming languages include C++, Java, VB, and C while unstructured computer programming languages include Fortran, Assembly language, or the old basic language. Structured programming languages are further sub-divided into object-oriented and procedural. The object oriented programming languages have objects to define some entities while procedural are linear and follow specific steps to accomplish a task (Louden, & Lambert, 2011).
Programming languages have evolved so that we now have languages that are used to program the World Wide Web. These languages have been designed so that they follow the current trends that are used by traditional programming languages. These design issues include the object oriented paradigm. There are developments that are being seen in the World Wide Web programming.
References
Louden, K. C., & Lambert, K. A. (2011). Programming languages: principles and practices. Cengage Learning.
Maloney, J., Resnick, M., Rusk, N., Silverman, B., & Eastmond, E. (2010). The scratch programming language and environment. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), 10(4), 16.
