Chapter 10: Software Development Security - Programming Languages and Concepts

At the very lowest level, the language that a computer can read is known as binary. "Bi" meaning two, as binary is only a combination of 1's and 0's. This is also known as machine code. There were no "programming" languages in the early 1950's, so this is how programmers wrote instructions for computers. Later, assembly language came along. Assembly language is only one step above machine language. Instead of all 1's and 0's, it uses symbols to represent many 1's and 0's. Assemblers were used to convert these symbols into machine readable code. Later on in the early 60's, high level languages started to emerge. Syntax became closer to human language and introduced abstract statements. Many statements could now be reduced to single line and provide the same functionality. Later, even more abstraction became involved in fourth-generation languages. Things that used to be constructed with a ton of code could now be accomplished with one-tenth of that. Programmers do not have to know how a computer works, how memory is handled, etc. when using very high level languages. The 1990's saw the emergence of what is known as natural languages, where the main goal is that the software can solve problems by itself instead of having an algorithm based method to complete tasks. Object-Oriented programming is widely used in today's world. Objects can be instantiated, communicate with each other, and inherit behavior and attributes from parent classes. This leads to code reuse and a lot less coding for developers. Instead of code being executed in a sequential manner, execution can bounce around from class to class.