What is Programming Language?

What is Programming Language?

As mentioned above, Computers understand instructions that are written in a specific syntactical form called a programming language. A programming language provides a way for a programmer to express a task so that it could be understood and executed by a Computer. Refer our another blog-post “What is programming language?” to know more about programming languages. Some of the popular Programming languages are Python, C, C++, Java, etc.

Why should you learn Computer Programming?

Now, after knowing so many things about programming, the big question to be answered is – Why should you learn Computer Programming? Let us understand why:

• Programming is fun: Using Programming, you can create your own games, your personal blog/profile page, a social networking site like Facebook, a search engine like Google or an e-commerce platform like Amazon! Won’t that be fun? Imagine creating your own game and putting it on Play Store and getting thousands and thousands of downloads!
• The backbone of a Technology Company: The backbones of today’s technology companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and many others, are giant computer programs written by a collaboration of thousands of skilled programmers. If you have the right business acumen, knowing programming can help you create the next big tech company.
• Pretty good salary: Computer Programmers are paid extremely well almost all across the world. Top programmers in the Silicon Valley make millions of dollars every year. Quite a few companies offer starting salaries as high as $100,000 per year.

Let us now get into an actual program

Writing your first program

Python is a widely used programming language. It is extremely beginner-friendly. You can download Python here: https://www.python.org/downloads/. After downloading, run the installer in order to install Python on your machine.

Let us delve into our first Python code now. Open your favorite text editor (we’d recommend Sublime Text) and copy paste the following 3 lines:

a = 54
b = a ** 8
print b

Save the file on your desktop as my_first_program.py

Now, do one of the following depending on your operating system:

• Windows: open command prompt and type python my_first_program.py
• Ubuntu/Mac OSX: open terminal and type python my_first_program.py

When you press enter, what do you see on the screen? Almost instantly after you press the enter key, you will see the following:

72301961339136

What’s that? That’s 548, computed by your computer in the blink of an eye! A typical human will take minutes if not seconds to get the result. You see the power of a Computer?

Congratulations, you’ve written your first program. Let us understand how it works.

a = 54

We are declaring here that we have a “placeholder” called as a to which we assign the value 54.

b = a ** 8

Here, we are declaring another placeholder called as b to which we assign the value a ** 8. Here, the value of a is 54. So, effectively we are computing 54 ** 8. What is **? The ** operator is the “power” operator. a ** b means ab.

print b

Finally, after the computation is done, we want to display the result on the screen. For this, we have used the print statement which essentially throws the result on your screen.

So, that was about the very basics of Computer programming. Hope you enjoyed reading it. Computer Programming is a huge field and there is a lot to explore further. Keep learning and keep exploring. Please feel free to post your doubts in the comments section. Please don’t worry if you feel that your doubt maybe silly. Every question/doubt is important. There’s no such thing as a stupid question.