This is going to be an extremely brief and high level overview of what a programming language is. My goal here is that if you don’t know what a programming language is before reading this, you have an idea of what it is after.
A programming language is just the way that you tell a computer what you want it to do. You run programs on your computer, like a web browser, or maybe iTunes. These are programs. Someone or a group of people built these programs, and the way they did it was by using a programming language.
There is a famous first program that people write, called “Hello World” where you just try and get the program to print out “Hello World.” Here is an example in a programming language called C:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(){
printf("Hello World");
}
Theres a lot of random stuff here, a lot of random syntax to get the program to run, but the basic idea is that this will output “Hello World” when you run it.
In another programming language called python, if you want to print hello world you just write:
print "Hello World"
Different programming languages have different ways of telling the computer to do things. Many math operations also carry over, so for example you could add two numbers in python with:
print 5 + 10
There is wayyyyyyyyyyy more to programming languages. There is a specific legal way to write things in programming languages, and that is called the syntax. There are lots of other ways to classify and talk about programming languages, but that is for another time.