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Before we begin with programming languages we must talk about our spoken languages (ie: English, French, etc.). Any language is a set of keywords or symbols (words) that mean something understandable by the people who speak the language. For example the following sentence:

I need a cup of Tea.

When I say this to any one of my friends they will bring me a cup of Tea. What we understand here is that this sentence contains 5 keywords (Keyword meaning a word preserved by a language that has meaning) and because my friends speak English their brain will compile and compute the sentence into something it can understand and execute.

If we convert this example to the computer programming languages world we can say that any programming language contains keywords and that we use these keywords to create a computer program. We can call this set of keywords that we will write to form a program “The Program Code”. So, programmers write code to form a program.

Let’s complete our human-computer languages analogy again. Any human can understand his own native language and the same applies with a computer. A computer can only understand its own machine language.

NOTE There are 3 major types for programming languages: Machine, Assembly, High-level languages. Machine language for any computer is created by the hardware designers so it’s considered to be the natural language of the computer.

But life is not so easy; English people have to communicate with others who speak different languages, and if we relate this in terms of computer languages we can say that the natural language of the computer, machine language, is very complicated, tedious, and error prone. So languages such as C# were developed to overcome the downfalls of machine language — it also makes our lives a lot easier!

Let’s take for example two people — one English; the other German. If they want to understand each other the German-speaking person will write a sentence in German and attempt to translate it into English. After the translation is complete, he/she will send it to the English-speaking person. In our human languages analogy we will assume that we write a program in C#. As was mentioned earlier that computers only understand their own machine code language the C# code must be compiled into machine code. At this point the computer will understand and execute the program.
In today’s computing world, there is a wealth of various programming languages available to us; however, they can each be categorized into one of the three major types:

* Machine Languages
* Assembly Languages
* High-Level languages

Machine Languages

As was mentioned earlier, a computer can only understand its own machine language. The machine language is the language that the hardware designers create and is quite complicated if you decide to use it to create a program, simply because it consists of sets of numbers (0s and 1s). Machine language uses these sets of numbers to perform various operations.

NOTE In our Human-Computer programming languages analogy if two English-speaking people speak to each other their brains will compile the code and understand it directly. If you are a machine code programmer then you will write the code that the computer will understand directly and execute the program.

Assembly Languages

Programmers found that developing even the simplest programs, using sets of numbers, was a very complicated process so they developed assembly languages. Assembly languages use keywords and symbols, much like English, to form a programming language — I can personally say that this is much better than the huge amount of numbers used in the machine languages — but at the same time introduces a new problem. The problem is that the computer doesn’t understand the assembly code, so we need a way to convert it to machine code, which the computer does understand.

Programmers developed assemblers which are programs that convert assembly language code to machine language code. By using these assemblers programmers can write code in assembly language and convert into machine code.

High-Level Languages

Computer scientists found that computers were quickly becoming popular all over the world, so they needed faster, easier, and more powerful programming languages than what was currently possible using assembly languages. They designed “high-level” languages and they called them high-level languages because when you develop applications using a high-level language you don’t have to deal with low-level details like machine code, which allows you to write keywords that are much easier than assembly and that can perform multiple operations. An example of a high-level language is C#.
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