We are all jealous of the programmers who with their capabilities are able to make computers do what they wish to do. It almost seems like magic. But is it? Read more to know the magic behind the screens.
How programmers do the talking?
To know how programmers do the talking, we need to know something about computers. You know computer is a machine that runs on electricity. So the only language it understands is current. On/Off or high/low voltage, it is what the computer understands. And hence Binary language was created. On/High voltage meant 1 and Off/low voltage means 0 for the computer.
So to talk to a computer we need to control the input current. How can we do that? We can have a switch and turn it on and off to create commands. But how will a computer do the calculations with just current. Well, there are circuits inside a computer, in the processor. And in those circuits there are gates(a.k.a., logic gates), but that is a topic of discussion for another day. The circuit has multiple input points and an output point. The needed current is entered through the multiple input points and it is processed to make the final output.
The switches were how early programmers talked to computers. There will be a lot of switches or bulbs. The programmers will manually switch the state of each and every switch or bulb according to command needed to pass. These commands collectively were known as a Program. And thus a man who writes programs are known as Programmers.
Well, after a long time of tweaking switches, humans had a lot. So they started to write programs. So what were the options? Well the computer understood binary only. But humans don’t. This was the birth of Assembly Language.
Assembly Language was not so different from Binary. But it had phrases which represented some function. What changes now? Without these “phrases”, programmers had to write and memorise binary code for all of them. And trust me it is not a pleasant process.
Well now you may think, if computer only understands binary, then how will it understand letters and phrases? There is a translator in role here. The Assembly program is translated from assembly language into binary language when the program is executed.
This opened the door for endless possibilities. If letters can be translated into binary, then we can make programs with normal letters and translate it into binary for the computer to understand.
This paved way to making of more such inventions. As they were & are used to program, they are called as Programming Languages. And this is illusion that makes programmers talk to computers.
Nowadays, programming languages have become more and more similar to English but like any language it has its rules. To program in any programming language, every programmer needs to follow the set of rules, commonly known as Syntax.
And every programming language its translator that translates the programming language into binary or machine language. There are some types of translators which perform differently but they do get the job done. Stay tuned to our blogs to know more about them.
Today there are a lot of advanced programming languages as shown in the image below:
But always everything is translated into binary language before execution.
If we decided that we were good with the switches, now you wouldn’t be reading this blog post. In fact, I wouldn’t have actually created it even. It is the evolution of programming languages which helped us improve our digital lives.
Stay tuned to know more and to keep learning.
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