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Memorandum
To: Karen Thomson
From: Sean Shepherd
Date: February 16, 2014
Subject: Programming Languages


This memo presents my audience, problem, and placement for the phrase I have chosen
to define and describe.
Term: Programming Language
Audience: The audience for defining and describing Programming languages would be
anyone seeking an introductory explanation of what a Programming language is
and does.
Problem: Programming languages can be really confusing in their diversity and complexity.

Placement: The extended definition and the description will be linked from an introduction
to computer science website.
In my technical definition I tried to focus on the similarities between Programming languages
and human languages, because the comparison is accurate and everyone uses language so it
relates to everyone.
I chose to have no introduction in my description because they would both appear in the same
document one after the other. I then organized it into how it looks as opposed to human
language, how it works, and what it does.




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Technical Definition
Computers are made to do what we want through the use of programming languages.
Programming languages can be thought of as foreign languages that humans use to speak with
computers. Three distinctions being that the computer cant refuse to do what we tell it to,
each conversation is called a program, and everything you write in a program is called code. A
diversity of programming languages exists just like the diversity of human languages. What
language a programmer chooses to talk to the computer with is based on preference (What
languages can they speak most fluently?), context (Where will this program be used?) and
features (How fast are their commands needed to be executed and what is their program
supposed to do?).
The languages are created following paradigms which influence the structure of
instructions and how the computer will go about executing those instructions. An English
sentence has a structure and what determines those structures when it comes to computer
languages are the paradigms. The five main paradigms are Imperative (A person gives a list of
commands for the computer to execute.), Functional (A person gives the computer tasks to
perform when it is given certain data.) Object-oriented (A person makes objects, such as
squares, and uses those objects to make the computer do things.), Logic (A person gives the
computer tests like If x then y and it will do certain things depending on the outcomes.) and
Symbolic (A person create complex instructions by combining many smaller instructions.)
programming. A computer language can fall under one paradigm or many. The most commonly
used languages such as C, C++, and Java are mainly Object-Oriented, but have pieces of all the
others in them.
Programming languages are built on top of other languages. Many modern languages
came from Latin and in the same way new programming languages come from older and more
primitive ones. As they evolve they tend towards a better balance of readability and power
(How much you can do with it.). A powerful language might be able to solve a complex
problem in minutes that would take years to complete by hand. A readable language is easy to
read and understand how the program is doing what it does. Readability can also make the
code in a program easier to update.




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Technical Description
Programming languages
do things in many
different ways, but they
all translate instructions
into machine code so the
computer can execute
them. The languages we use
to talk to computers are
called high-level languages
because we can convey much
more meaning in a shorter
amount of instructions. Its
like how in English a word
can have a deeper
meaning depending on
how a person says it. A
good example of a high-level instruction is Park the car. There are many steps implied such as
turning the wheel, pressing on the gas, pressing on the brake, and shifting the gears. All the
simple steps are implied by a complex instruction.
Programming languages look like a mix of numbers and letters that seems strange, but
has some sort of pattern. It is just like looking at a foreign language such as French. The letters
used seem the same, but are put together in weird ways. How a language looks can influence
how often it is used. A language with a high readability might be used more often than a more
powerful language with a low
readability. An example of a
language with a good readability
would be C++ (See Figure 1)
while one with
poor readability would be Lisp
(See Figure 2).
Different programming languages might have different purposes. The purposes
have a huge range including making the computer draw something evaluate complex
mathematical expressions, or find patterns.

Figure 2
Figure 1