Computers were largely comprised of vacuum tubes that had to be manually plugged, unplugged, replaced, and transferred, all to make the gigantic machines process equations. In the early days, programming electronic computers was as much a physical job as it was a mental one. A broad introduction to programming languages.But for simplicity’s sake, we’ll be referring to compiled and interpreted languages throughout this article. One quick note: programming languages are not themselves compiled or interpreted and can be implemented with either a compiler or an interpreter.
We’ll briefly introduce the topic of computing languages and provide some relatable analogies to help you understand how programming languages speak to computers. The answer involves compiled and interpreted language implementations, in part, and this article will lay the groundwork for exploring the similarities and differences between these concepts. This raises the question of how these programming languages become understandable by computers. Today, modern programming languages are closer to human languages than the binary instructions an electronic computer understands.
As computer science has evolved, so too have the ways that programmers interact with computers, all with the basic purpose of instructing them what to do.
