The Programming Languages (POST 1)

 

 

For our week one assignment, the class was instructed to use a program called Scratch. Scratch is known as one of the world’s largest coding communities mainly for children and young people to experiment with different visual interactions. This includes (but not limited to), creating different stories, games, and animations. A lot was learned through reading about the different programming languages in the text as well as creating an animation through the Scratch program. There were some roadblocks while creating the animation but all in all it was a very fun and interesting process along the way. I believe that with a little time everyone can learn to be good at programming and coding if they take the right steps into learning how it goes.

One of the roadblocks I went through while using Scratch was the different coding variables used to move the animation along. The program requires that when creating an animation you must utilize the different motions, looks and sounds to complete the animation itself. The difficulties I faced were trying to figure out the assembly language as far as having input and output numbers for the machine language so the program could run. This was included in the different blocks to be used for the “Moving Cat” animation. For this information I had to refer to the text in Chapter 2: Section 2.9 on how assembly language goes directly to machine language. The text stated, “An assembler translates assembly language instructions to machine language instructions (0’s and 1’s). As a result, the machine language program is placed in memory and ready for the CPU to run.” (Vahid, 2019, Programming: Assembly Language, Section 2.9.1). This helped me to understand what I needed for the output to run correctly.

Some of the main differences between the program languages that were discussed in the text were machine languages are basically 0’s and 1’s that are inputs that need to execute the program. The assembly language is a textual human-understandable representation that gives the output for the machine language’s 0’s and 1’s. Finally, the higher-level language requires higher-level instructions to enable greater programming productivity. I would say the one I found easiest to use was the assembly language only because I was able to utilize the outputs better while creating the animation on the Scratch program. To me C++ would be the most popular language out of them all because I feel as though C++ was the catalyst to most of the higher-level programming languages. C++ has been known to compile the best information regarding operating systems such as Windows or Linux. It has also been known to be very efficient and flexible when it comes to performance on different software.

There are many things you can learn when it comes to programming or coding. A lot of people have yet to learn programming’s true potential. When it comes to the future of programming, there can be so much that the human mind won’t be able to comprehend. Technology continues to grow each day. Personally, I look forward to learning more new things as I continue to learn more when it comes to different programming languages.

References

·      Scratch - About. (n.d.). https://scratch.mit.edu/about/

·      Vahid, F. (2019). Computing Technology for All. ZyBooks.

 

URL for project: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1031648955