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
It’s a chain.
The first program was very basic, and could only understand on and off. But a human could use it in a clever way to make a second program which could understand a set of different on and off settings in a pattern, like when you see someone hold up two fingers instead of one, and that means something.
The next program after that could understand where one pattern like that ended and where another began. At this point, it’s like words, only more basic – just lots of “on” and “off.” But see, here it gets useful, because these are like symbols that the computer understands. It can move electricity in patterns defined by these sets of on-off.
At this point programs were just sets of cards with holes in them that a computer would read. There were no monitors or keyboards.
Well, that program was used to make a new program that not only understood these patterns, but could show a human on a screen letters and numbers that represented those patterns. And with those letters and numbers – stuff like “PUSH 1” and so on – it was a lot easier to write more complicated programs.
This is where it really took off. Now people were telling the computer how to understand even more words and turn those into long, long sets of on-off that it could use to direct electricity in _really complicated_ ways.
These “compilers” are what form the basis of all programming languages today. Programs that teach computers how to understand other programs.
Sorry if that was too long.
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