Programming languages are just like human languages, which are used to control the working or behavior of a machine or a computer system. These languages are formulated by a set of syntactic and semantic rules. Programming language is an artificial language, as the programmers design it. Programming languages are the set of instructions that are sequenced to function as a program to perform a specific task or manipulation. These languages also control some of the external devices such as printers, keyboards, mouse, etc.
The need for the programming languages arose as a need to communicate with the system. Since machines cannot understand human languages that are natural, the programming languages were programmed to communicate between human and the system. From the invention of Difference engine (1822) by Charles Babbage, it has become a mandatory process to instruct computer machines on what it has to do. Difference machine was of physical motion partially. This was then replaced by using electrical signals in ENIAC (1942).
The first generation computers used machine languages whereas electrical signals in the second generation called as Assembly languages. Following this, some macro instructions were used in these assembly languages and were called as programming languages like FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, PASCAL. Later came the structured programming languages like C, C++. In fourth generation, the programs used logical programming constructs and thus Java, SQL, Perl were introduced. Thus without programming languages, it is a tedious task to run any application on a computer. The plan of introducing one unique programming language was not successful as the diversity in programming is vast with improvements in technologies and resources. So, only enhancements can be made with some new developing concepts. Any critical unresolved problems can also be resolved easily with programming languages. The Scope and experiments on this topic will never fade and moreover programming will be made still easier and quicker with the help of programming languages.
