Monday 30 January 2012

The Origin of Programming Languages



It all started with invention of P.L.A.D.C. (Programmable Logic Array Digital Circuit) or P.L.D.:

P.L.A.D.C. gave birth to programming concept with Machine Languages.
Before P.L.D. only Digital Logic Circuits existed.
The invention of P.L.D. gave birth to the concept of programming itself. This was a monumental shift in the image of computers. 
Machine Language
The P.L.D. was such a device that could convert itself into any D.L.C. according to the signals sent in electronic impulses which were high and low combinations. The high and low states were named as 0s and 1s respectively and thereby called as machine language.
While machine languages were the first programming languages, it involved a process called debugging. You may know what is debugging (in higher level languages the compiler or the IDE does automatic debugging) but when machine languages were used debugging was manual. This was definitely a tedious work and the higher-level language programmers of today definitely won't do it as they are used to relatively much more sophisticated environment.  
Assembly Language  
In assembly language the 0s and 1s were replace by mnemonics. Example '1010' was replaced with 'A'. Here programming became much easier and understandable until of course there was a shift in the complexities of the functionality demanded. 
Third Generation Languages
When more and more complexities were demanded these mnemonics in the assembly language too became relatively complex for the programmers. This lead to the creation of Third Generation languages such as C, PASCAL, BASIC etc. and later on OOPs based languages like C++, Java, C# etc.
To be continued......