This article aims to provide an awareness of programming languages and tools.

Why So Many Programming Languages?

Even in modern computing there is a wide variety of programming languages still beiong implemented, but why do we have so many? Well each programming langiage has its own strengths and niche technology areas. We also have many legacy applications still in use that were writeen before some of the modern languages were developed.

Let’s list a few languages that are found in use today (some older than others!):

• Fortran

• C

• C++

• C#

• Java

• Visual Basic 6

• Visual Basic (.NET)

• VBA

• Ruby (although this could be called a scripting language too!)

There are also numerous scripting languages in use:

• VBScript

• JavaScript

• PHP

• Perl

• Python

For many of us when we started out writing programs we had a text editor and character based screen to work with. These days programmers have the luxury of full blown development environments and purpose built editors that colour code key words, highlight matching brackets and do all sorts of other wonderful things for us too. Some are open source and free, others you need to pay for. Some popular editors and developments environments are:

• Notepad++

• Eclipse

• NetBeans

• Microsoft Visual Studio

Many of the tools available today support development environments for multiple languages.

Programming Language Types

Programming languages generally fall into the following categories:

• Machine Code

• Assembly Language

• BASIC

• Structured languages

• Procedural languages

• Object Oriented languages

• Scripting Languages

Machine Code

Machine Code is hardware dependent, different for every vendor’s hardware. With machine code registers have to be loaded with data to be processed, they are very low level and the code is a sequence of ones and zeros (binary). Machine Code is both difficult to write and very time consuming.

Assembly Language

Assembly Language is also hardware dependent, different for every machine. Assemblers translate symbolic notation to machine code. It is again a low level language.

Structured Languages

Structrured Programming Languages enable variables to be declared, they provide control flow through IF statements, loops and CASE statements. Structured Programmiong Languages also allow functions and/or procedures to be created which means tasks can be modularised, code can be resused rather than repeated.