Computer Languages

Including the Binary Language of Moisture Evaporators

A computer language usually refers to a programming or markup language. These languages have grammar including syntax just like other natural human languages. In fact, those who study foreign language tend to pick up new programming languages easier as well, and vice versa.

Major Categories

Computer languages can be categorized in dozens of ways but ultimately fall into the following three major categories:

Category Description
Imperative Contain instructions or procedures telling the computer what to do and how to do it requiring the computer to remember what it is doing as it does it called state.
Declarative Contain descriptions of what is wanted from the computer by describing it rather then telling it what to do.
Data Data languages are not programming at all but critically important since they contain structured data used by other languages. There is often a fine line between declarative and data languages.

One of the biggest mistakes in the minds of computer programmers is assuming that only imperative programming is programming. You see mistakes even in curriculums like Harvard that state emphatically that HTML is not a programming language, which is categorically wrong, it is, it’s a declarative programming language.

There are dozens of other computer language paradigms. These are just the two main categories.

See Also