How Does Computers Read Codes?

As a Software Developer it is very important you know how the codes you write are processed by the computer. Today we would be looking at what High Level Programming Languages, Low Level Programming Languages and Language Translators are. If you are a self-taught Developer, you might have heard of these terminologies, but you are still trying to figure out what they are, this post is for you.

Computers can only understand 1s and 0s; so, during the early stages of computing instructions were passed to the computer using paper tapes and punched cards were the places with holes signified 0 and the places without holes signified 1. It wasn't an easy process, so people came up with the Machine Language for instructing the computer; this method became more stressful and complex for humans because it only used binary and hexadecimal digits which were hard for humans to understand, and this pushed people to create what we call High Level Programming Languages. The big question is what is a High-Level Programming Language?

High Level Programming Languages (HLL) are languages that use easily readable programming context for programmers to create programs. You can look at it as a User-Friendly language because the language is more understandable by Humans than to Machines. Example of such languages are C, Python, JavaScript, Java etc.

Most HLLs use English words as their identifiers.

On the other hand, Low Level Languages are quite the opposite of High-Level ones, because they are more understandable by the machine than to humans. It's major difference with High Level languages is that it doesn't abstract programming concepts and it is not human friendly, it is rather machine friendly. Examples are Assembly Language and Machine Language.

Another tricky question: If Computers understands only 1s and 0s how does it understand High Level Languages?

If you're probably asking this question, I got the answer. The computer understanding an English word?! Now my friends this is where the Language Translator comes in.

A Language Translator is a program that translates High Level Languages to Machine Language for the Computer to understand. Without Language Translators we wouldn't be able to write programs with HLLs but thanks to the creators of this program that we are able to do so.

Thank You