As you know, all the commands inside the computer are transmitted in a special machine language, the operators of which are a complex and unstructured sequence of zeros and ones. This turns out to be very convenient for electronic equipment, where the unit can be designated as a signal of a certain level, and zero - as the absence of such a signal. However, writing instructions to perform complex tasks using such code is extremely difficult, and finding an error and debugging is simply impossible. Therefore, special, more convenient for developers, high-level programming languages were developed.
History
A program is called a sequence of standard commands, the implementation of which leads to the solution of a specific problem. For the first computers, programs were written directly in machine language; they were very bulky and difficult to understand. In the beginning - mid 50s of the last, 20th, century, the first macros appeared that made the programming process more structured, and then the so-called Assembler languages, which also focused on machine codes. Following the rapid development of computer technology, programming languages also developed and improved. And already in the mid-50s Fortran appeared, the first full-fledged high-level programming language. In 1968, Nicolas Wirth introduced the new language Pascal, which is widely used to develop and create interesting software products to the present. Then came BASIC, a language whose basis is used in the Visual Basic object-oriented platform. In the 70s, another of the languages widely used in our time appeared - C, which was adapted specifically for system programming. At present, holistic and diverse object-oriented systems, as well as those languages that help specialists create Internet applications: html, php, java, have developed and spread. In total, there are about two thousand different languages in programming, in the total mass of which there are conditional languages that are not used in computers, as well as numerous high-level programming languages.
Classification
The simplest classification divides all existing tools into so-called low-level programming languages, either machine-oriented, and high-level programming languages, or user-oriented. The main difference between them is that programs written using the languages of the first group (namely, Assembler and mnemonic codes) depend on a specific computer, or rather, on its processor and set of commands. Programming in a high-level language makes it possible to get an application that will work on any computer, regardless of its hardware. There are also two large groups of languages: procedural and non-procedural, within which they also introduce a division into structural and operational, functional and logical.
Typically, each specialist in programming has in his arsenal about ten different programming languages that he can use to solve specific tasks. Basically, these are, of course, high-level programming languages, but machine-oriented languages that are more complex for a developer are widely used to create some parts of a software product.