Programming language

A programming language is a human-readable lexicon and grammar that a programmer uses to instruct a computer how to operate. Programs written in a programming language have to be translated into machine code, usually by a compiler program. Machine code consists of multiple lower-level instructions which the computer can actually understand. Use of a programming language allows programmers to work at a higher level than machine code (which is not human-readable).

Language categories

The following are some of the ways that people have categorized different computer programming languages, although there is not always agreement on the precise meaning of the categories, or which languages belong in them. This article will attempt to describe the more common contradictory uses of the following terms.

Compiled vs. interpreted

One way in which various programming languages have traditionally been categorized is as compiled vs. interpreted languages. The traditional view was that compiled languages were first translated, by a compiler program, from human-readable source code into binary machine code. Some widely used early languages such as Fortran and C use pure compilation.

Conversely, interpreted languages rely, at run time, on a special runtime application, called the interpreter, to translate source code into machine code during program execution. An example of an early purely interpreted language is Snobol. Purely interpreted programs tend to execute more slowly due to the necessary intervention of the interpreter while the program is "executing". HTML is a special-purpose language that is interpreted; the interpreter for HTML is called a web browser, and it reads the HTML line-by-line and renders a web page for display to a user based on the HTML code.

The division between compiled languages and interpreted languages has blurred since the 1990's with the advent of hybrid platforms such as Java and the .NET Framework (C# and VB.NET). These hybrid languages are compiled down to an intermediate language at the time a program is written. When the program is later run, the intermediate code is loaded into a sophisticated, optimized runtime engine for "execution". Such runtime engines could be implemented as interpreters (early ones were), but nowadays they typically use Just-In-Time compilers to generate native machine code from the intermediate language on an as-needed basis. So multiple compilers are involved, one used by programmers to create programs that contain intermediate code, and another used at runtime to "interpret" the intermediate language (or in actuality, to just-in-time compile portions of intermediate code to native code on the fly as needed).

High-level vs. low-level

Another way in which programming languages are sometimes categorized is into "high-level" versus "low-level" languages. "High-level" programming languages have one high-level command or statement corresponding to many machine code instructions. "Low-level" programming languages, including especially assemblers, may have approximately one human-readable instruction per binary machine instruction. A "high-level" language may also sometimes be called "low-level" if it permits a programmer to perform certain (possibly risky) hardware or operating system operations. C is technically "high-level" but is sometimes regarded as "low-level" as well because it imposes little, if any, restrictions on what a programmer can do in terms of accessing the computer's raw hardware capabilities.

General purpose vs. special purpose

A third categorization for programming languages is whether the language is "general purpose" or "special purpose". A language is considered general-purpose if any program at all can be coded in the language. Conversely, if the language is targeted towards making certain kinds of things possible, but does not do everything that other languages might, it is considered "special purpose". Examples of general-purposes languages are C, Java and C#. An example of a special-purpose programming language is SQL (used to interact with database programs).

Markup languages (special purpose)

Markup languages contain a lexicon and grammar, but they are limited in purpose. Their purpose is to mark up text information into segments, and label each segment so that another program, sometime in the future, can "render" or display this information in a useful manner (instead of as one large blob of text). Examples of markup languages are HTML, LaTeX, SGML, XML and Postscript. HTML marks up information intended to be displayed later in a web browser; HTML tells the browser where paragraphs begin and end, which text to make into hyperlinks (and the target for those), what color to make the background, and things like that. Web browsers later "interpret" the markup commands within HTML pages and then format the page for display to human readers. Postscript commands are used to tell printers how to print documents; printers act as the "interpreter" for postscript commands embedded within documents to be printed.

PDF is a derivative of Postscript and serves many of the same functions but now can be embedded with Javascript and other features. XML takes the markup approach one step farther. Not only can it be used for human-readable presentations, but it also provides a simple, consistent format that other programs can use to store and transfer data across platforms.

Declarative vs. Imperative

Examples of declarative languages would be prolog and sql. All other languages are mostly imperative. Declarative languages tend to be very terse and describe only what task the programming wishes to do but not the details of how to do the task. Imperative languages tell the machine both what and how to do the task. For instance in sql:
select * from people order by last_name;
gives a sorted list of people but does not specify the type of sorting algorithm used. One could argue that libraries of functions that abstract out the details of execution are declarative. Prolog and sql code specify some details so the boundary between declarative and imperative is not strict. Declarative languages are often described as 4th generation languages.

Assemblers

In the first computers, programmers had to work with binary machine code, which was very tedious and difficult. It was a huge breakthrough when someone wrote the first "assembler", a program which translated human-readable mnemonic words (written in plain text) into binary machine code. There is usually a one-to-one correspondence between assembler source code mnemonics (commands) with machine code instructions. A different assembler had to be written for each kind of computer, because each computer has a different machine instruction set, so there are many different assembler languages in existence (they are sometimes also called assembly languages). Assemblers were pre-cursors to high-level programming languages. In fact, compilers usually translate high-level program source code in two stages, first from human-readable high-level instructions to assembler, then from barely-human-readable assembler to machine code.

Popularity of programming languages

It's very hard to know the true popularity of programming languages, because of lack of objective information. Anyway, C (with C++, its object-oriented derivative) and Java seem to be the most popular languages, before PHP and Perl that are however very active in the internet community. TIOBE Programming Community calculates every month the popularity of programming languages, based on search engines criteria. ohloh.net presents a graphical statistic comparison based on coding metrics (like the number of projects, of lines, etc). On october 2007, the number of projects stored in the freshmeat.net repository or in sourceforge.net repository shows the same tendancy.

That kind of statistics inform us about the current technical tendencies, making also possible to know about the market trends that can be important to anticipate the requirements in formation, qualified employment, etc.