Omwrok

It was nice actually writing something in this blog, with almost nothing to do at home, and I was delighted—well, not that excited— when I forced to write about programming languages.

Kind of ironic, ain’t it?

Well, here’s what I found out on programming languages: they have generations. No, not your family of grandparents, parents, and whatnot, but kinds of forms of programming.

Sounds confusing? Well, it is. Dont’t get me wrong, but their first generation—let’s call ‘em 1GL—programming languages are written in just two characters: 1 and 0.

Yes. It sounds crazy, but the program you are using now could possibly be made out of 0s and 1s. Seriously, I’m serious. The first programs were. They were written just to make programs that worked, be they easy or hard to make. A noteworthy example of this generation is, guess what, machine language.

The Second Generation Programming Language era marked on the invention of assembly language: languages that had nonsensical humor if taken literally. For example:

INP
STA 08
INP
STA 09
LDA 08
SUB 09
OUT
HLT

But, it marked the “We don’t need to write in 0s and 1s” years, where they no longer needed to meticulously write code. Plus, it was readable (to an extent).

Your favorite programming languages, C++ and Java, are comin’ in at Third Gen, in what possibly is the transition of literal nonsense to at least readable English. I mean, saying the phrase “If the value of varialbe y is less than 9” in C++ (if (y<9)) is easier than saying it in binary (1 0 1 0 1), right?

The next in line was the Fourth Generation. It provided user-friendly (you don’t need to know programming) and near effortless (you need only to type) commands. An examples are PROLOG and SQL.

Last, but not the least, is the Fifth Generation. Instead of you doing the algorithms, processes and whatnot, all you needed to do was to find out what were to be solved. It would be like doing instructions on an interface rather than a series of text.

[ Sources cited and used ]

Some of the things I also found out were some of the (many) types of programming languages. To keep it short, let me show to you, in bullet form…

• Object-oriented – wherein there are objects created in the program that has a specific function—for example, the buttons of a program.
• Logical – the language uses logic (“x < y”,etc.) to solve a program.
• Funtional – language uses computations, like for example, x = num * 6; it is the somewhat opposite of Logical.
• Imperative – namesake; uses imperative sentences to do a funtion.
• Concurrent – wherein multiple tasks are made at once.

That said, good night, good fight!

[http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~kahl/SE2S03/2006/SE2S-2006-Intro_4up.pdf]