Higher Level Languages

Should programming a computer cost more than buying the computer?

Until the mid 1950s, programming digital computers meant creating instructions in the language of the machine itself—a slow, error-prone process. As computers grew more affordable, programming costs began to overshadow hardware costs.

The development of higher-level, more user-friendly programming languages made writing large programs easier. But the cost of creating software was—and is—still huge.

Tech Talk: Moving Beyond Machine Language

As stored in the computer's memory, a program is just a pattern of zeros and ones that encodes a sequence of instructions in the computer's “machine language.” But writing that sequence is tedious and error-prone.

The earliest advance in programming was to create an "assembly language" so that people could write names instead of numbers, both for the operation codes and for the identification of memory locations. The "assembler" program translates that into machine language. But, generally speaking, the programmer still had to write one line in the program for every computer instruction.

The next breakthrough, in higher-level languages like Fortran, was to create a "compiler" program that would translate a more English-like statement into as many machine-language instructions as needed to perform the function.

Language designers have created hundreds of higher-level languages, used by programmers to write millions of programs.