– How did computer scientists develop the “code” that coders use to tell computers what to do?

Question

When we think of modern coding, we think of Python and Rust and Swift and Ruby and so on.

My question is more abstract. How exactly did computer scientists develop the original language used to tell a computer what to do and when to do it? How did they teach the computer to recognize that langauge?

Going even further than that, how did current languages get developed? Did they just rewrite the original computer code from scratch or are all modern computer languages designed to communicate with this baseline original code which all computers were programmed with?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Funny enough I posted an answer earlier that had to go over this sort of thing. Now I need to fill in the gaps.

The first computers were hard wired. You physically changed the wires around to reprogram it. I don’t think I need to explain how or why that would eventually get messy, since a hard wired computer can only run a single program before needing to be rewired and debugged- sometimes as literally as it originally meant getting insects out of the wires and circuits so they didn’t mess up the program operation.

Other answers here have gone over binary code that gets fed to modern computers and that is the first software programming language ever used on any computer. You just needed some way to feed that information to the computer itself so it could operate it- see above for the baseline of every computer past the first.

Funny enough, there’s no universal binary code, either. What runs on the 6502 won’t work on the z80, and you’d have to account for the differences in microcontroller code in order to run similar software. But it is upon machine code that every single operation your computer today performs, and the languages built upon languages built upon languages is such a marvel I keep wondering why nothing breaks- well, more than it already does.

So how was it developed? Computers are made of circuits, and from the most simplistic NOT gate you can create every other circuit necessary to make a computer with programmable codes. The NOT gate being the foundation of every circuit in a computer is why you can build fully functional computers in Minecraft redstone without any command blocks. Look some of those up, they’re crazy.