Learning the purpose of programming languages
A programming language is a special language that is used to communicate with a device such as a computer. Computers accept information and instructions using the binary number system, which only consists of 0s and 1s, and programming languages are the way they receive these instructions. Today, most software engineers work with what is called a high-level language, a programming language that is closer to a language that humans can understand, such as English. In contrast, low-level languages are closer to machine instructions and the binary system.
The following example is a side-by-side comparison of a high-level language, C#, and a low-level assembly language. They both illustrate the common programming technique of declaring a variable and assigning a value, which is a way of storing information that will be used throughout the software program. In this example, they are declaring a variable called num and storing a value of 5:
