Eli5: What is the difference between various programming languages? Dont they all do the same thing?
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One of my first computer classes was one on languages. I studied Algol, Snobol/Spitbol, LISP, and Assembler. Each language is quite different, and was designed to do different things efficiently.
“Algol” was an algorithmic language, meant to help scientists and engineers do the messy calculations of a Fast Fourier Transform, or some numerical method, easily and quickly.
Snobol and Spitbol were languages designed by Bell Canada, looking for ways to speed up “411 information” services, which they were legally required to provide for free. These were essentially very fast search routines which allowed for what we now call ‘fuzzy’ inputs and outputs. For example, if you wanted a Smith on Maple, it might also return a Smythe on Oak.
LISP (‘Lotsa Irritating Silly Parentheses’) is a contraction of “List Processing”, and was the language of choice for AI in the early days. The program had two basic commands, *car* and *cadr*, which meant take the right branch or left branch. The tree was a bunch of choices encapsulated in rounds and rounds of parentheses. When you are trying to do this on a keypunch machine where the ribbon has been used so much, there are no legible marks on your cards, you will spend 10 or 20 runs just getting the punctuation correct. It was a nightmare. (I’m sure it’s better now on a terminal)
Finally, assembler, or machine language, is the actual instructions to the microprocessor to do things at a bit or byte level. For example, you don’t work with a file, you work with a “register”, which is a special location on the CPU chip. There are commands that let you shift bits sideways in the register, and commands that let you compare bits between one register and another, and all the loops and conditions that you find in any programming language. The challenge is to understand what’s going on at the very lowest level of your logic.
Hope this helps.
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