The Purposes of Computer Programming Languages

Computer programming can be viewed on many levels. Superficially it is a means for specifying how a computer should perform a given task. If that were all it was, we could must enter a long sequence of numbers that correspond to the machine instructions to accomplish the task.

Modern computer languages go much further. They provide platforms for communicating, not only the specific tasks to accomplish but our assumptions about them, the structure of the data that they will manipulate, and the algorithms that will accomplish them.

But even beyond that, they provide a common language for people to talk to each other about programming tasks. As such, they evolve with the growth of our understanding of the activity of programming, its attributes, and the algorithms that are the final product of the activity.

To summarize, we write programs to enable the automated solution of computational problems by computers but also to communicate with each other about these computational processes. In the interest of clarity of communication, we have seen the trend of programming languages toward higher and higher levels of abstraction with an ever increasing investment in compiler technologies that translate these abstractions into efficient executables that provide the computer tasks that we set out to specify in the first place. It is ultimately this communication that offers their greatest benefit.


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