Why do you need programming language?

Answer 1

Without programming languages it would be impossible to program a computer to perform a specific task, let alone reprogram it to perform a variety of different tasks. Machine code is the native language of the machine and is therefore a programming language in its own right (in the early days of computing, it was the only language available). Even if we couldn't reprogram the machine, we'd still need some means of providing it with the machine code that would determine the computer's function, even if that means encoding those instructions on a permanent memory chip such as a ROM. This necessitates that we also need to know which "dialect" of machine code the machine specifically understands, because machine code is a machine-dependent language. That is, the machine code to program one type of machine cannot be used to program another type of machine -- each has its own specific version of machine code. We can, of course, use low-level and high-level languages that we can more easily understand, but in order for the computer to be able to understand those languages we must still program it to translate the source code to its native machine code, which means we need a programming language. In the absence of any other programming languages, we must use machine code -- which is exactly what we used with the very first computers. Once we have one translation program, we can use it to create newer and better translators, newer and better languages. Today, we can use virtually any high-level programming language on any machine in order to produce machine code for any other machine. But it all started with just one machine and one programming language -- machine code.