Closing Thoughts about More Python Skills

Lesson Details:

I: Introduction:

1: This article is meant to discuss the various types of programming languages and how they work in terms of functionality and complexity. It also mentions that we will focus on Python in this article.

II: Body:

1: There are many different programming languages in existence today, and they can be divided into four basic categories: low-level languages, high-level languages, scripting languages, and domain-specific languages.

2: Low-level languages provide a barebones, machine-like interface to the system’s resources. They are often used to communicate with hardware and peripherals like displays and keyboards. Low-level languages include C and assembly language (which is a type of C).

3: High-level languages are the opposite. Instead of communicating directly with the hardware, high-level languages use a variety of abstractions to simplify communication with the computer. The general idea is to make the code simpler to read and write by representing concepts in more familiar terms (such as English phrases). While high-level languages make coding easier, they also make it harder to optimize the code; it’s much harder to speed up slow algorithms written in high-level languages than slow algorithms written in low-level ones. High-level languages include C++, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, COBOL, Fortran, Lisp, and Scheme.

4: Scripting languages are somewhere between low-level and high-level languages. Scripting languages are simple enough to be used for text processing but powerful enough to be used for application development. Scripting languages are similar to high-level languages, except that they are interpreted instead of compiled. This means that the lines of code are not converted into machine instructions before being executed; instead, they are translated one line at a time as they are being executed. Scripting languages are very easy to program in, but they are also more difficult to optimize. Common scripting languages include Perl, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Lua, Conway’s Game of Life, and Rexx.

5: Domain-specific languages are more complex than scripting languages but less complex than traditional programming languages. They are designed for a specific problem domain (a particular field of study) so they tend to have unique syntaxes that would seem foreign to programmers working on other problems. Domain-specific languages often use an existing general purpose language as their implementation language (such as Python or Java); this is why Python is mentioned in the introduction. Domain theories include Natural Language Processing (NLP), Mathematical Theory (MT), Geospatial Information Systems (GIS), Computer Graphics (CG), Networking (Networking), Database Management (DB), Data Mining (DM), Business Intelligence (BI), Robotics (Robotics), Natural Language Generation (NLG), Modeling & Simulation (M&S), Software Languages (Software) and others.