Programming+Languages

Programming Languages
//From Dr. Meyer's course//

For our purposes, a language is a structured means of information exchange.

Spoken languages (English, Chinese) Written languages (Arabic, Latin) Visual languages (ASL, QE) Tactile languages (Braille)

What do you think about this painting?

**Scream**



 * ~ Artist || [|Edvard Munch] ||
 * ~ Year || 1893 ||
 * ~ Type || [|Oil], [|tempera], and [|pastel] on cardboard ||
 * ~ Dimensions || 91 cm × 73.5 cm (36 in × 28.9 in) ||
 * ~ Location || [|National Gallery], Oslo, Norway ||

Can dance be considered a language?

**The Ballerinas**


Artist: **Edgar Degas** Style: **Impressionism** Medium: Gouache and Pastel on canvas Year: 1885 Original Location: Paris

Art and dance are certainly languages but they may not be useful or reliable methods of exchanging information. After all, two different people may have two different understandings of what a picture or a dance is trying to communicate.

In order to be useful and reliable, in order for a language to be able to consistently convey a specific message a language MUST have a well-defined Syntax and Semantics.


 * Syntax:** Syntax refers to the spelling and punctuation rules for a given language.
 * Semantics:** Refers to meaning, specifically the meaning of the words (objects, artifacts) that are part of a language.

A programming language is an language designed to allow us to communicate with a computer. Programming languages allow us to create programs; a program is a set of instructions that we want a computer to follow. A program can be a piece of office software (like Word) or a control program (that drives a car or flies a plane) or a game. But in each case that program was something created by a person, using a programming language.
 * B. Programming Languages**

There are many, many different programming languages. Here are just a few: Smalltalk Cobol ColdFusion Lua Ada Fortran Haskell Scheme Pascal Actionscript Assembly Visual Basic Ruby Perl Python JavaScript PHP C# C++ C Objective-C Java

Processing is the programming language that this website discusses. All of the tutorials in this website are written using Processing. Processing is based on another programming language called Java, and thus it uses a Syntax and Semantics that is very similar to Java. To learn more about the Syntax and Semantics of the programming language Processing, follow the links below.
 * C. Processing**