When you’re getting started in the software world, the concept of high-level and low-level programming languages can be challenging to grasp, but once you get the basic idea, it becomes easy to know which type of language each one is.
What Are Programming Languages?
Firstly, let’s start by doing a recap on what exactly a programming language does. We can define a programming language simply as a set of instructions or steps on what we want a computer to do. Computers do not act by themselves; we must tell them what we want them to do, and to do this, we need to find a way to “speak” to them.
So, computers don’t understand English by themselves. If we want them to understand what we are trying to say, we need to either speak their native language (binary code) or find another language they may be able to understand.
This is where programming languages come in: say, Java, Python, C, etc. All these languages are easier for the machine to understand. However, since they are not its native language, the computer still needs some sort of “translator” to understand them; therefore, we consider them high-level programming languages; because our computer cannot understand them natively, it still needs quite some help, but they’re a good middle ground because we can speak one of these much more easily than binary code.
Now, what would be a low-level programming language then? binary code!?
Not quite…
The Difference Between Low-level and High-level Programming Languages
The programming languages that are closer to our machine’s understanding are called low-level programming languages. They still need some sort of translator since it’s not the native computer language, but they are way easier and faster for the machine to interpret since they don’t need as much translation as high-level languages.
Then, why don’t we always code in low-level programming languages? you may ask…
Well, the thing is, as we get more low-level, it becomes easier for the machine to understand but more difficult for us, humans, to speak it.
Low-level languages are hard to read, maintain and debug, and thus they are more error-prone. The code we write in a low-level language needs to be very specific to the machine processor architecture, so if we tried to execute the same code in a computer with a slightly different processor, it might not work at all without major corrections.
Nowadays, technology has greatly evolved, and processing power has increased greatly to the level that the advantages of a high-level language greatly outweigh the ones of a low-level language; therefore, most programs are written in high-level languages, and we leave the use of low-level languages to very specific applications.
Sources:
- Prakash, P. (2018, October 13). Low level languages – advantages and disadvantages. Codeforwin. Retrieved August 27, 2022, from https://codeforwin.org/2017/05/low-level-languages-advantages-disadvantages.html
- BYJU’S. (2022, March 17). Difference between high level and low-level languages. BYJUS. Retrieved August 27, 2022, from https://byjus.com/gate/difference-between-high-level-and-low-level-languages/
