Ever wonder how people ever came to the point where they could build a cnc machine (A very advanced tool that can make highly complex parts down to accuracies of about 1/1000s of an inch or even more)? Well it started like this; Man creates fire. Man uses fire to melt together pieces of iron ore. Man adds burned wood (carbon) to iron to make steel. Steel is good, but not straight. How does man make straight steel. Well, man knows taut string make perfectly straight line. Man bangs metal until aligns with string. Man covers steel with oil to reduce rusting. Man uses new steel workbench to make better and straighter tools. Man .... etc...

So, you use one thing to leap-board you to another, better thing. Programming is the same way. The first programs were basically written by studying an extensive manual that had all of the instructions that the CPU would recognize. You would enter those instructions one by one (hitting enter after each instruction) until you built your own program. Most computers did not have a way to save information permanently so you had to rewrite your programs every time you booted up. Oh by the way, when you say booting up, you're referring to the term: "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". This was a very laborious and time consuming business. Most keyboards had very well engineered 0, 1, and enter keys. Oh, you thought people would program with words? Nah, words were for losers. The only language around was that of the CPU (Binary instructions).

Well, the coolness wore off and hard drives were created and prices eventually dropped. With a hard drive, a translator could be programmed in binary that took words typed into the computer, and translated them into binary instructions. This translator was called a machine code compiler and the language for it was called Assembly. Assembly is different for every architecture. You cannot write a program in Assembly for one CPU and expect it to work on another. Assembly was used to make the first true universal languages that would work on multiple architectures. One of these languages was C. C is what is called a low level language that led the way for much more advanced operating systems and programs. C was still very obscure however and large programs were hard to manage. That's where C++ came into play. C++ is what is called a high level language that allowed software developers to create programs that were huge compared to programs written in C. C++ was one of the first languages to incorporate object oriented programming. A programming style that is widely used today. It basically means, that most data has a "type" that is "handled for you". For example. In c, you would tell the computer to store the number 18 in a specific location in memory. Then when you would want that number, you would have to remember (or have it written down) where that location was. In C++, you could just make a variable, and have some implemented system handle the rest for you.

Even simpler languages were made to help speed up development time but most are not translated into binary like Assembly, C, and C++ are. They instead are interpreted as they are executed. When looking at a completed program in C++, the data is simply 0s and 1s because it was translated to that. When looking at higher level interpreted languages like GML, you see written code (words and such) because they are not translated before they are run. Every interpreted language has what is called a, you guessed it, interpreter. The interpreter is a program that takes meaning from the code you write, and executes it in its own way. This is why interpreted languages are generally slower than compiled (translated ahead of time) languages. Come to think of it, I'm not really sure why every interpreted language isn't compiled. I guess that means this article isn't finished. Oh well, Ill leave you with this chronological list of coding language types.

1. Binary instructions

2. Assembly

3. Low Level

4. High Level

5. Interpreted