A programming language is a computer language specially designed to describe the set of consecutive actions or instructions that a computer must execute. For example: PHP, Java, C ++, Python.
In this way, a programming language becomes the practical way to get the team to execute the actions the user wants. Programming languages obey a set of rules that allow the instructions to be interpreted to be expressed.
It is important to understand that programming language is not the same as computer language, since the latter include other languages that format a text but are not programming in themselves.
The programmer It is the professional who deals with using programming languages to create those sequences of instructions that, together, will make up computer programs. This means that you have to understand and be very fluent in these languages.
Examples of programming languages
| ADA | PHP |
| BASIC | Perl |
| C | Prolog |
| C ++ | ASP |
| Cobol | Action Script |
| Fortran | Python |
| Java | JAVA |
| MATLAB | Java Script, etc. |
| LISP | Assembler |
| Pascal | Logo |
Characteristics of these languages
As a very basic approximation, it can be said that a every instruction corresponds to an action by the processor, and that the written code is transformed into machine code so that the processor can process it in what is known as machine language, which is based on a sequence of zeros and ones (binary data).
Programming languages allowed, among other things, the portabilityIn other words, it can be adapted to be executed on different types of equipment. At first, you only worked with the machine code; then it was switched to assembly language, which followed more or less the same structure as machine language, but substituting letters and words for numbers. This was followed by the Fortran.
The languages that computer equipment use to communicate with each other, on the other hand, are known as communication protocols and they have very different characteristics from common programming languages.
Types of programming language
There are different kinds of programming languages, such as functional or procedural, the imperatives, the logical ones, the hybrids, the object-oriented ones.
The former create programs using functions and receives as input the result of other functions. The latter create programs through a sequence of commands grouped into blocks; the commands are conditional, since they allow the program to return to a command block if a certain condition is met.
Were the imperatives the first programming languages that were spread, still today many languages use this principle. Another classification of programming languages distinguishes between interpreted languages and compiled languages.