What is a programming language

There were hundreds of programming languages from the beginning of the computing, but at all times there are maybe a dozen, which are popular and popular simply means that the language is used in a lot of current software is used by a large number of people and there is an active community and a significant labor market for that language.

Now, as the years go by, various languages Wax and Wane in popularity. New languages come forward. Some succeed, but most of them are not. So this list changes, but changes gradually. Now most programmers learn and use many languages during his career. Once you have the basic knowledge, the easier to pick up languages.

The following technologies feature most strongly in job vacancy advertisements:

Java — featured in 18% of adverts with an average salary of $100,000 USD

    JavaScript — 17%, $90,000

    C# — 16%, $85,000

    C — 9%, $90,000

    C++ — 9%, $95,000

    PHP — 7%, $75,000

    Python — 5.5%, $100,000

    R — 3%, $95,000

    Scheme — 3%, $65,000

    Perl — 3%, $100,000

These are worldwide statistics which will have a US bias owing to its larger market. C# hits the top spot in the UK (32%) while JavaScript wins in Australia (13%).

A little later in here we will dive deeper into the most popular languages, but if you're new to this, you might think why, why are there so many languages? If all we're doing is writing simple instructions for computer, why isn't there just one computer language?

Well, actually there is such a language, but not one of these that I have mentioned earlier. You see the CPU, the chip central processing unit, which is the brain of any computer, desktop, laptop, server, phone, game console, well do not understand one of these languages.

We could say informally when we are writing programming code that the computer understands, but we're not. Not really.

You see all you understand your chip called machine code or machine language. These are the actual instructions that run directly on the computer.

So the question is, why not write computer code? Well, because it's almost impossible to do. And numerical operations, small working instructions into smaller chunks of memory in the computer and even if you could write, it’s basically unreadable to anyone else.

This is for the machine. It is not for a human being, and the level of machine code works of the CPU machine code would be different for different models of CPUs. Write a complete program into machine code would be like digging a tunnel through a mountain with only spoons.

It's theoretically possible, but it would take you so long and so tedious that you wouldn't even try, so all of these languages, the popular ones and the others, are in fact a compromise. They are invented languages.

That’s possible in theory, but it would take so long and so boring that not even try, so all these languages, popular and others, are in fact a compromise. They invented languages.

They're just trying to close the gap between us as human beings and computer hardware. Now, some of the languages are actually very close to machine code. Any word closest assembly language

In general, the language is more difficult to machine code is to write more and you should know that the real hardware and this is called a low-level language

Now as you move away from the CPU into what are called higher-level languages you worry less about the hardware. Now this code is often easier to write and to share even across different platforms, but it can be slower when running because these languages aren't necessarily optimized directly down to the CPU level. Having said that, these days speed differences are minimal and we will be focusing on the high-level languages in here, but whatever we write has to be converted down to machine code before it can run.

So while the machine code piece seems that the most important part, we're not really interested in machine code. Of course we know that this is what works, but planning is everything to us in the source code. This is what we call the statements we wrote, Java, C #, C ++, Ruby, Python, whatever.

We write the source code at some point is translated then into machine code, so we can run on your computer. When I say I'm writing code, source code, and when I say I'm coding or programming, I mean the same thing. So, to start writing any of these programming languages, writing of these statements, write our source code, we need to understand three things:

1) How to write it, literally where do we actually start typing this,

2) How to understand how that source code will be converted to machine code,

3) How does he actually run it, how do we execute our program?

And some of this does depend on the language that we pick, but let's begin with, how to actually start writing these statements.