What does the code that makes up programming languages look like?

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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

36 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Lots of them are written in C, or (like java) run in VMs written in C or C++. The C/C++ compilers (GCC, Clang, etc) are also written in C and C++ (i.e., self-bootstrapping.) The early C compilers were bootstrapped with a minimal version in a hardware-dependent assembly language that could compile the C version. C is still heavily used.

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