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4. Answer the questions using the information in the text:

  1. What is a “programming world”?

  2. Which IT areas is the author proficient in?

  3. According to the article, what is the 90/10 rule?

  4. Why was the Java GUI system not very popular?

  5. What should every good programming team include?

    1. 5. Match the languages to the technologies, e.g. C++ with Windows, JavaScript with Web, etc.

6. Work in pairs and discuss:

  1. How do you see the future of programming?

  2. What kind of programming experience is most important in the job market?

Text 23. PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

1. Discuss the following questions in pairs:

    1. What is a programming language?

    2. Where were first programming languages created?

    3. Are you familiar with any classifications of programming languages? Can you give examples of languages from this or that class?

    1. Have you worked with any programming languages yet? What were the languages?

Task 2. A) Match the following words and word combinations with their Russian equivalents:

1.in sequence

2.to branch off

3.an integer

4.a character

5.to traverse

6.to master

7.tries-and-true

8.to standardize on

9.to favour

10.to interface

a. преодолевать, проходить

b. принимать за стандарт

        1. проверенный, надежный

        2. подключать

        3. овладеть, усвоить, освоить

        4. целое число

g. отходить от основного направления

h. символ

i. оказывать предпочтение

j. последовательно

В) Replace the words in italics with their synonyms from part A). Translate the sentences into Russian:

      1. It is disadvantageous to radically change programming languages because there already exists the store of reliable codes.

      2. Procedural languages specify the instructions that are executed in a given order, although sometimes a program can change the direction.

      3. Nowadays there is a variety of programming languages designed to connect Web pages.

      4. It is very difficult to learn all major programming languages, so programmers usually use only a few of them, and developers always adopt one or two existing languages as a standard.

      5. Most programmers prefer “parallelized” versions of familiar languages rather than wholly new ones.

      6. In logic programming languages logical steps are constructed in such a way that the program can go through them to solve the problem.

      7. In procedural languages each type of data should be identified, for example, if it is a whole number or a symbol.

3. Read the text and give the main idea of each paragraph:

Thousands of different programming languages have been created since the beginning of the 20th century, with many more being created every year. Most languages in use today are higher-level varying according to their nature.

The mainstream consists of languages that are procedural in nature. That is, they specify a main set of instructions that are executed in sequence, although the program can branch off or repeat a series of statements until a condition is satisfied. A program can also call a set of instructions defined elsewhere in the program. Constant or variable data is declared to be of a certain type such as integer or character before it is used. There are also rules that determine what parts of a program can access what data. Examples of procedural languages are Algol, BASIC , C, COBOL , FORTRAN , and Pascal.

A variant of procedural languages is the object-oriented language. Such languages (for example, C++, Java, and Smalltalk) still use sequential execution and procedures, but the procedures are “packaged” together with relevant data into objects. In order to display a picture, for example, the program will call upon a particular object (created from a class of such objects) to execute its display function with certain parameters such as location and dimensions.

Although the bulk of today’s software is written using procedural languages, there are some important languages constructed using quite different paradigms. LISP, for example, is a powerful language used in artificial intelligence applications. It was the first functional language and is written by putting together layers of functions that carry out the desired processing.

There are also “logic programming” languages, of which Prolog is best known. Here a chain of logical steps is constructed such that the program can traverse it to find the solution of a problem.

Since it is very difficult to master all major programming languages, most programmers are fluent in only a few languages and developers tend to standardize on one or two languages. The store of tried-and-true codes built up by the programming community makes it disadvantageous to radically change languages. Thus, FORTRAN and COBOL, although more than 40 years old, are still in considerable use today. C, which is about 30 years old, has been gradually replaced by C++ and Java, but the latter languages represent an object-oriented evolution of C, intentionally designed to make it easy for programmers to make the transition. (Smalltalk, which was designed as a “pure” object-oriented language, never achieved widespread use in commercial development.)

Similarly, when programmers had to cope with parallel processing (programs that can have several threads of execution going at the same time), they have tended to favor “parallelized” versions of familiar languages rather than wholly new ones.

While the basic elements of computer languages usually remain in the same recognizable forms, the way in which programmers experience their use of languages has changed considerably through the use of modern visual integrated development environments. A variety of languages have also been designed for tasks such as data management, interfacing Web pages, and system administration (scripting languages, awk, Perl, PHP, and Python).