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
I’m a third year computer engineering major, so the following is all my personal dumbed down view of the answer to your question.
The basic hierarchy looks like this, from highest level (farthest from hardware) to lowest level (closest to the hardware):
– object oriented languages like Java, C++
– C
– Assembly language
– Machine code
Java compiles into C, C compiles into assembly langauge, assembly language is turned into machine code. These different levels of abstraction generally come from developments in programming over time. You can Google image search each of those names to see examples of them. As you get closer to the hardware, things generally get simpler in complexity but much more tedious. Generally, the farther you get from the hardware, the easier it is to quickly write powerful programs that do a lot of stuff.
In assembly language, doing something like taking an average of 10 numbers then adding that to a running total would probably take more than 100 lines of code (guessing). In C and Java it would take 1 line. In Java it might even happen without your knowledge when invoking some operator or function. I’m not familiar with Java since I mostly use C.
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