Do you really know about computer program?

5 min readSep 10, 2021

Have you ever wanted to do a web developer, system analyst, software engineer or any other job in the IT field or are you interested in that field? First you need to know what is a computer program. Glad to tell you that you are in the right position.

Before you learn about computer programming, you must know what is programming. Programming is the process of writing instructions to a device such as a computer or mobile device. This set of instructions may be referred to by various names. A few popular names are program, computer program, application program, and executable.

Definition of computer program;

“A computer program is a collection of instructions that can be executed by a computer to perform a specific task.”

Brief history about programming;

Ada Lovelace(1815–1852) has been called the world’s first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace was a women. What she did was written the world’s first machine algorithm for an early computing machine that excited only one paper.

Elements of a program:

There are basically 5 elements in a program.

Input: Getting data and commands into the computer.
Output: Getting your result out of the computer.
Looping and conditionals: Testing to see if a condition is true or false, and cycling through a set of instructions until conditions is met.
Mathematical operations(arithmetic operations): Performing mathematical calculations on your data.
Variables and data structure: Storing information, which may change over time.

Let’s move on to the programming languages;

Programming languages are a vehicle for communication between humans and computers. Programming languages come in a verity of formats can serve different purpose,

Ex:- JavaScript is used primarily for web applications, C# is used primarily for .net applications.

There are two types main types of programming languages;

High-Level programming languages
Low-Level programming languages

The following are some of programming languages.

C
C#
C++
Java
Ruby
VB.SCRIPT
Python
SQL
MATLAB
Lips
Pascal
Assembly language
Objective-C
Prolog
Julia
Haskell
Kotlin
Swift
HTML 5
JavaScript
Shell
R
Typescript
Scala
CSS
PHP
ASP.NET
Ruby
SQL
XML

Let us now see which fields in the above programming languages are related.

Characteristics of a programming language-

A programming language must be simple, easy to learn and use, have good readability, and be human recognizable.
Abstraction is a must-have Characteristics for a programming language in which the ability to define the complex structure and then its degree of usability comes.
A portable programming language is always preferred.
Programming language’s efficiency must be high so that it can be easily converted into a machine code and executed consumes little space in memory.
A programming language should be well structured and documented so that it is suitable for application development.
Necessary tools for the development, debugging, testing, maintenance of a program must be provided by a programming language.
A programming language should provide a single environment known as Integrated Development Environment(IDE).
A programming language must be consistent in terms of syntax and semantics.

Hierarchy of programming language:

High-Level Language: High level programming language holds a storing abstraction from the details of the computer allowing it to be read and written more clearly by developers.(Ex: C,C#,C++,Java)

Assembly Languages: This language is a low level programming language designed for a specific type of processor. It may be produced by compiling source code from a high-level programming language.

Machine Language: A machine language is defined as a computer programming language consisting of binary or hexadecimal instructions that a computer can respond to directly.

Computer Hardware: Hardware is the physical machinery and parts that make up an system. Arguably the must important piece of hardware virtual to any computer system is the central processing unit(CPU).This is the portion of a computer that retrieves and executes instructions.

I hope you now know about computer program and saw the big picture about computer programming. You can learn more from the following recourses and further readings.