Programming Languages

The trend in programming language design is to develop still higher levels of
abstraction. This allows the human programmer to think in bigger pieces and in
more novel or conceptual ways about solving the problem at hand. We would like
eventually to be able to write programs that contain only the instruction
“Solve the problem.” Yet, we must remember that code written in any high-level
programming language is still of no use to the computer trying to execute that
code. No matter how abstract and powerful the language for front-end
communication with the computer, the machine itself is still toiling away at
the level of binary digits, absolute memory addresses, and machine language
instructions. The services of an appropriate translator must be employed to take
the code down into the machine language of that computer.

Some programming languages at a glance.