Programming language

Years ago, the only way to tell a computer what to do was directly: you had to give it exactly the instructions it understood. That meant no if statements, no functions and not even proper variables. In other words, you had to program in machine code.

This was an issue, as writing machine code takes a long time, so is expensive.

Inventing the programming language

Ultimately, all programming languages were invented to provide high-level abstractions to make programming easier.

Many programming languages were created to try to make the lives of developers easier, but the one that has been commonly used for the longest time is C.

Assembly

Assembly is essentially one step more high-level than machine-code (the lowest-level way of programming).

It takes the instructions of machine code and gives them more user-friendly names, such as jmp, mov, etc. That's easier than typing out hexadecimal codes.

Static- and dynamically-typed languages

A programming language's type system is one of its distinguishing features. Type systems are generally divided into two categories:

• Static typing
• Dynamic typing

Compiled and interpreted languages

Different programming languages have different ways of executing source code, mainly using one of two methods (or both):

• Compiled languages use a compiler
• Interpreted languages use an interpreter