Take a language like Java. How was it originally created? I can’t wrap my head around how someone invented a computer language to run without having some “prior” language that it allows the first lines to function. Is it just Java all the way down, like someone wrote a single line of Java and then every other line was built on that?
What about the first computer language? What was the basis that that functioned on?
Thanks for any help, I hope that was phrased in a mildly intelligible way.
Edit; I’m trying to think of it like human language: at some point there was a first “word” spoken by someone and understood by another and from there the structure started to be born. What were the first “words” on a computer that led to where we are now?
In: Technology
Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, used a giant machine with cogs to decrypt nazi messages in ww2. With the aid of mathematicians, he would take very large numbers and “encode” them into cogs, then run the machine and check the result. The cogs were arranged in such a way that as they moved, they would affect each other in a way that could be seen as “calculating”. The result would help them discover what the encrypted messages could mean.
Try to look at languages the same way as you look at the cogs. We “encode” some meaning onto the machines, and from this we create language. No different to how each word you are reading right now is really an encoding of symbols that represent sounds of a language you understand.
We simply make a machine that does an operation and then we say “let that operation, represent this thing”.
Java is decades ahead of Alan Turings Bombe machine, and he himself was decades ahead of the ideas that sprouted computer science, particularly set theory. Algorithms as an idea has also been around for centuries, so it’s hard to pick a point and say “it started here”. Many of computer science ideas are taken from maths.
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