Difference between programming & programming language (The Syntactic Sugar of Programming)

Programming is a concept of communicating with your machine. Programming is the bridge between a programmer and a machine to communicate with each other to solve a problem. In order to solve a problem we need to make our thinking and solutions understandable by our computers. For example, I want to make a solution that includes various conditions, variables , objects and heavy calculations and I need to make my concepts understandable by my computer. and to deliver my thoughts or solution to my computer we definitely need a language right? because without a language how can we talk or communicate with computers? So, we can say that the language that is used in order to communicate with computers to deliver our thoughts or our solution of a problem to our computer is called a Programming Language. Programming Language works on top of the core concepts of Programming hence we are calling the Programming Language as the Syntactic Sugar of Programming.

Now a question can arise that “Why do we need a Programming Language in the first place to communicate with our machine or computers?”.

Well.. the answer basically is our computers cannot understand anything except two numeric signs which are 0 and 1. We also know these two signs as binary numbers. Some people also call it by the name of machine code. So what is a Machine Code?

Well.. in computer programming a machine code is basically the mother language of our machines/computers which is completely understandable by our machines/computers. Machine code is basically a very low level Programming Language that contains binary and hexadecimal instructions which a computer/machine can respond to directly.

Our computers don’t understand anything except machine code to execute a program. And because of the complexity of machine language it is nearly impossible for us humans to write machine codes to solve large or complex problems. Hence we need a language that is understandable by humans. But if we make a language that is understandable by humans, then a new problem arise and that is machine cannot understand that language.

So we need to convert our language into machine code that is clearly understandable by computers. We solve this problem by compilers. Compilers are basically a translator which translates our code into executable machine codes so that our computers can understand it and runs it successfully.

So we can come to a conclusion about the whole picture of programming language and how it work with our machines with the help of translators or compilers inside them. We also understand the need of programming language in order to communicate with our computers.

Lastly we can simply say that Programming is the message of a Programmer to a Computer. But for Computer to understand that message we need a translator as the middleman of the conversation who can translate programmer’s message to computer and computer’s reply to programmer. Same message can be translated in different languages based on requirements and origin.