Overview

There are various programming languages today. The most common probably being: Java, Python, and C++. There are many more, but for this article we're going to mainly talk about ASM, C, and Java.

Some languages are high level, while others are low level. Let's briefly talk about what this means.

High Level

High level programming languages, like Java, focus on human readability, and application development. They have abstracted away details that pertain to the computer, to streamline development. ie When writing a program to save a .png image, the programmer doesn't need to know anything about file types.

Note: Every file (.txt, .png, .jpg, .exe, etc) has special pieces of information in the file the tell that the operating system how to execute said file type.

Low Level

Low level programming languages, like C, focus on performance and interfacing with hardware directly. Although C can be used for application development, many of the tools aren't prebaked into the language for you. ie to circle back around, writing a program to save a .png image, you need to know exactly what the composition of a .png file is.

Note: when C was developed, it was actually considered a high level language, but compared to high level languages today, we now consider it low level.