How to Create Programs?

Closest to the hardware: Assembly language

The only programming language directly understandable by a computer is machine language. A more human-readable representation of machine language is assembly language. It is a set of very primitive operations linked to a specific family of processors (the computer’s “brain”) and manipulating its memory.

Here’s an example of a basic program written in assembly language. It displays "Hello" to the user.

$$$$

  str:
  .ascii "Hello\n"
  .global _start

  _start:
  movl $4, %eax
  movl $1, %ebx
  movl $str, %ecx
  movl $8, %edx
  int $0x80
  movl $1, %eax
  movl $0, %ebx
  int $0x80

$$$$

Pretty scary, isn’t it? Fortunately, other programming languages are much simpler and convenient to use than assembly language.

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The family of programming languages

There are a large number of programming languages, each adapted to different uses and with its own syntax. However, there are similarities between the most popular programming languages. For example, here’s a simple program written in Python.

Press the RUN button below the code and see the output of various programming languages.