Programming Languages

QUESTIONS :

What is Programming Language? Discuss programing Languages category wise.
Elaborate various Programming Languages. How will you classify them?

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES - Category Wise

A programming language is a notation designed to connect instructions to a machine or a computer. Programming languages are mainly used to control the performance of a machine or to express algorithms. At present, thousand programming languages have been implemented, but few languages are becoming very popular which may used by a professional programmer in their career.

At present, computer programmer has many choices to choose the language, but there are many differences between programming languages.

So, here is a brief information regarding what are the different types of programming languages, differences between programming languages and 10best Programming Languages 0f 2020.

Language types :

Machine and Assembly languages
Algorithmic languages
Business-oriented languages
Education-oriented languages
Object Oriented Languages
Scripting Languages
Education-oriented languages
World Wide Web display languages
Document Formating Languages

MACHINE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGES

Machine language consists of the numeric codes for the operations that a particular computer can execute directly. The codes are strings of 0S and 1S, or binary digits (“bits”), which are frequently converted both from and to hexadecimal (base 16) for human viewing and modification. Machine language instructions typically use some bits to represent operations, such as addition, and some to represent operands, or perhaps the location of the next instruction. Machine language is difficult to read and write, since it does not resemble conventional mathematical notation or human language, and its codes vary from computer to computer.

Assembly language is one level above machine language. It uses short codes for instructions and allows the programmer to introduce names for blocks of memory that hold data. One might thus write “add pay, total” instead of “0110101100101000” for an instruction that adds two numbers. Assembly language is designed to be easily translated into machine language.

Like machine language, assembly language requires detailed knowledge of internal Computer Architecture. It is useful when such details are important, as in programming a computer to interact with input/output devices (printers, scanners, storage devices, and so forth).

ALGORITHMIC LANGUAGES

Algorithmic languages are designed to express mathematical or symbolic computations. They were the first high-level languages.

FORTRAN

The first important algorithmic language was FORTRAN (formula translation), designed in 1957 by an IBM team led by John Backus. It was intended for scientific computations with real numbers and collections of them organized as one- or multidimensional arrays. FORTRAN made it convenient to have subprograms for common mathematical operations, and built libraries of them.

ALGOL

ALGOL (Algorithmic language) was designed by a committee of American and European computer scientists during 1958–60 for publishing algorithms, as well as for doing computations. ALGOL introduced block structure, in which a program is composed of blocks that might contain both data and instructions and have the same structure as an entire program. Block structure became a powerful tool for building large programs out of small components.

LISP

LISP (list processing) was developed about 1960 by John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was founded on the mathematical theory of recursive functions (in which a function appears in its own definition). A LISP program is a function applied to data, rather than being a sequence of procedural steps as in FORTRAN and ALGOL. LISP also uses the list structure to represent data, and, because programs and data use the same structure, it is easy for a LISP program to operate on other programs as data.

LISP became a common language for Artificial Intelligence (AI) programming, partly owing to the confluence of LISP and AI work at MIT and partly because AI programs capable of “learning” could be written in LISP as self-modifying programs. LISP has evolved through numerous dialects, such as Scheme and Common LISP.

C programming

The C programming language was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan at the AT&T Corporation. The C language is a basic programming language and it is a very popular language. It uses a compact notation and provides the programmer with the ability to operate with the addresses of data as well as with their values. This ability is important in systems programming, and C shares with assembly language the power to exploit all the features of a computer’s internal architecture. C, along with its descendant C++, remains one of the most common languages.

BUSINESS ORIENTED LANGUAGES

COBOL

COBOL (common business oriented language) has been heavily used by businesses since its inception in 1959. A committee of computer manufacturers and users and U.S. government organizations established CODASYL (Committee on Data Systems and Languages) to develop and oversee the language standard in order to ensure its portability across diverse systems.

COBOL uses an English-like notation—novel when introduced. Business computations organize and manipulate large quantities of data, and COBOL introduced the record data structure for such tasks. A record clusters heterogeneous data such as a name, ID number, age, and address into a single unit. This contrasts with scientific languages, in which homogeneous arrays of numbers are common. Records are an important example of “chunking” data into a single object, and they appear in nearly all modern languages.

SQL

SQL (structured query language) is a language for specifying the organization of databases (collections of records). Databases organized with SQL are called Relational because SQL provides the ability to query a database for information that falls in a given relation.

For example, a query might be “find all records with both last_name Smith and city New York.” Commercial database programs commonly use a SQL-like language for their queries.

EDUCATION ORIENTED LANGUAGE

BASIC

BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was designed at Dartmouth College in the mid-1960s by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. It was intended to be easy to learn by novices, particularly non-computer science majors, and to run well on a time-sharing computer with many users. It had simple data structures and notation and it was interpreted: a BASIC program was translated line-by-line and executed as it was translated, which made it easy to locate programming errors.

Its small size and simplicity also made BASIC a popular language for early personal computers. Its recent forms have adopted many of the data and control structures of other contemporary languages, which makes it more powerful but less convenient for beginners.

Pascal

About 1970 Niklaus Wirth of Switzerland designed Pascal to teach structured programming, which emphasized the orderly use of conditional and loop control structures without GOTO statements. Although Pascal resembled ALGOL in notation, it provided the ability to define data types with which to organize complex information, a feature beyond the capabilities of ALGOL as well as FORTRAN and COBOL.

During the late 1970s and ’80s, Pascal was one of the most widely used languages for programming instruction. It was available on nearly all computers, and, because of its familiarity, clarity, and security, it was used for production software as well as for education.

Logo

Logo originated in the late 1960s as a simplified LISP dialect for education; Seymour Papert and others used it at MIT to teach mathematical thinking to schoolchildren. It had a more conventional syntax than LISP and featured “turtle graphics,” a simple method for generating computer graphics. (The name came from an early project to program a turtlelike robot.) Turtle graphics used body-centred instructions, in which an object was moved around a screen by commands, such as “left 90” and “forward,” that specified actions relative to the current position and orientation of the object rather than in terms of a fixed framework. Together with recursive routines, this technique made it easy to program intricate and attractive patterns.

OBJECT ORIENTED LANGUAGES

Object-oriented languages help to manage complexity in large programs. Objects package data and the operations on them so that only the operations are publicly accessible and internal details of the data structures are hidden. This information hiding made large-scale programming easier by allowing a programmer to think about each part of the program in isolation. An object hierarchy made it possible to define specialized objects without repeating all that is in the more general ones.

Object-oriented programming began with the Simula language (1967), which added information hiding to ALGOL. Another influential object-oriented language was Smalltalk (1980), in which a program was a set of objects that interacted by sending messages to one another.

C++

The C++ language, developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at AT&T in the mid-1980s, extended C by adding objects to it while preserving the efficiency of C programs. It has been one of the most important languages for both education and industrial programming. Large parts of many operating systems, such as the Microsoft Corporation’s Windows 98, were written in C++.

Ada

Ada was named for Augusta Ada King, countess of Lovelace, who was an assistant to the 19th-century English inventor Charles Babbage, and is sometimes called the first computer programmer. Ada, the language, was developed in the early 1980s for the U.S. Department of Defense for large-scale programming. It combined Pascal-like notation with the ability to package operations and data into independent modules. Its first form, Ada 83, was not fully object-oriented, but the subsequent Ada 95 provided objects and the ability to construct hierarchies of them. While no longer mandated for use in work for the Department of Defense, Ada remains an effective language for engineering large programs.

Java

In the early 1990s, Java was designed by Sun Microsystems, Inc., as a programming language for the World Wide Web (WWW). Although it resembled C++ in appearance, it was fully object-oriented. In particular, Java dispensed with lower-level features, including the ability to manipulate data addresses, a capability that is neither desirable nor useful in programs for distributed systems. In order to be portable, Java programs are translated by a Java Virtual Machine specific to each computer platform, which then executes the Java program. In addition to adding interactive capabilities to the Internet through Web “applets,” Java has been widely used for programming small and portable devices, such as mobile telephones.

Visual Basic

Visual Basic was developed by Microsoft to extend the capabilities of BASIC by adding objects and “event-driven” programming: buttons, menus, and other elements of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Visual Basic can also be used within other Microsoft software to program small routines.

SCRIPTING LANGUAGES

Scripting languages are sometimes called little languages. They are intended to solve relatively small programming problems that do not require the overhead of data declarations and other features needed to make large programs manageable. Scripting languages are used for writing operating system utilities, for special-purpose file-manipulation programs, and, because they are easy to learn, sometimes for considerably larger programs.

PERL

PERL (practical extraction and report language) was developed in the late 1980s, originally for use with the UNIX operating system. It was intended to have all the capabilities of earlier scripting languages. PERL provided many ways to state common operations and thereby allowed a programmer to adopt any convenient style. In the 1990s it became popular as a system-programming tool, both for small utility programs and for prototypes of larger ones. Together with other languages discussed below, it also became popular for programming computer Web “servers.”

WORLD WIDE WEB DISPLAY LANGUAGES

HTML

The World Wide Web is a system for displaying text, graphics, and audio retrieved over the Internet on a computer monitor. Each retrieval unit is known as a Web page, and such pages frequently contain “links” that allow related pages to be retrieved. HTML (hypertext markup language) is the markup language for encoding Web pages. It was designed by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN nuclear physics laboratory in Switzerland during the 1980s and is defined by an SGML DTD. HTML markup tags specify document elements such as headings, paragraphs, and tables. They mark up a document for display by a computer program known as a Web browser. The browser interprets the tags, displaying the headings, paragraphs, and tables in a layout that is adapted to the screen size and fonts available to it.

Web scripting

Web pages marked up with HTML or XML are largely static documents. Web scripting can add information to a page as a reader uses it or let the reader enter information that may, for example, be passed on to the order department of an online business.

CGI (common gateway interface) provides one mechanism; it transmits requests and responses between the reader’s Web browser and the Web server that provides the page. The CGI component on the server contains small programs called scripts that take information from the browser system or provide it for display. A simple script might ask the reader’s name, determine the Internet address of the system that the reader uses, and print a greeting. Scripts may be written in any programming language, but, because they are generally simple text-processing routines, scripting languages like PERL are particularly appropriate.

JavaScript

JavaScript is one such language, designed by the Netscape Communications Corp., which may be used with both Netscape’s and Microsoft’s browsers. JavaScript is a simple language, quite different from Java. A JavaScript program may be embedded in a Web page with the HTML tag <script language=“JavaScript”>. JavaScript instructions following that tag will be executed by the browser when the page is selected. In order to speed up display of dynamic (interactive) pages, JavaScript is often combined with XML or some other language for exchanging information between the server and the client’s browser. In particular, the XML Http Request command enables asynchronous data requests from the server without requiring the server to resend the entire Web page. This approach, or “philosophy,” of programming is called Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML).

VB Script

VB Script is a subset of Visual Basic. Originally developed for Microsoft’s Office suite of programs, it was later used for Web scripting as well. Its capabilities are similar to those of JavaScript, and it may be embedded in HTML in the same fashion.

Behind the use of such scripting languages for Web programming lies the idea of component programming, in which programs are constructed by combining independent previously written components without any further language processing. JavaScript and VB Script programs were designed as components that may be attached to Web browsers to control how they display information.

XML

HTML does not allow one to define new text elements; that is, it is not extensible. XML (extensible markup language) is a simplified form of SGML intended for documents that are published on the Web. Like SGML, XML uses DTDs to define document types and the meanings of tags used in them. XML adopts conventions that make it easy to parse, such as that document entities are marked by both a beginning and an ending tag, such as <BEGIN>…</BEGIN>. XML provides more kinds of hypertext links than HTML, such as bidirectional links and links relative to a document subsection.

SGML

SGML (standard generalized markup language) is an international standard for the definition of markup languages; that is, it is a metalanguage. Markup consists of notations called tags that specify the function of a piece of text or how it is to be displayed. SGML emphasizes descriptive markup, in which a tag might be “<emphasis>.” Such a markup denotes the document function, and it could be interpreted as reverse video on a computer screen, underlining by a typewriter, or italics in typeset text.

DOCUMENT FORMATING LANGUAGES

Document formatting languages specify the organization of printed text and graphics. They fall into several classes: text formatting notation that can serve the same functions as a word processing program, page description languages that are interpreted by a printing device, and, most generally, markup languages that describe the intended function of portions of a document.

TeX

TeX was developed during 1977–86 as a text formatting language by Donald Knuth, a Stanford University professor, to improve the quality of mathematical notation in his books. Text formatting systems, unlike WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) word processors, embed plain text formatting commands in a document, which are then interpreted by the language processor to produce a formatted document for display or printing. TeX marks italic text, for example, as {\it this is italicized}, which is then displayed as this is italicized.

TeX largely replaced earlier text formatting languages. Its powerful and flexible abilities gave an expert precise control over such things as the choice of fonts, layout of tables, mathematical notation, and the inclusion of graphics within a document. There are also related programs such as BibTeX, which manages bibliographies and has style sheets for all of the common bibliography styles, and versions of TeX for languages with various alphabets.

PostScript

PostScript is a page-description language developed in the early 1980s by Adobe Systems Incorporated on the basis of work at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Such languages describe documents in terms that can be interpreted by a personal computer to display the document on its screen or by a microprocessor in a printer or a typesetting device.

Although PostScript can be read and written by a programmer, it is normally produced by text formatting programs, word processors, or graphic display tools.

The success of PostScript is due to its specification’s being in the public domain and to its being a good match for high-resolution laser printers. It has influenced the development of printing fonts, and manufacturers produce a large variety of PostScript fonts.