1. Answer the questions. Then discuss in pairs.

1) How long have you been using the computer?

2) Can you program on your computer? What do you need to make programs?

3) What programming languages have you already known? Which ones are you studying at the moment?

Unit 10 p r o g r a m m I n g l a n g u a g e s

STARTER

1. Carry out a survey of PL use among your classmates. Find out: What programming languages are the most popular among them? Why?

READING

2. With the help of this diagram and the text below, try to tell about the functions the programming languages perform.

Programming languages

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

Computer languages are symbolic systems that computers eventually understand. They help your programs serve your needs. Compilers are programs that help to make this “understanding” happen. While the first generation of high-level programming languages, such as Fortran, are still in wide use and evolving, many new languages with higher level abstraction capability are emerging. Since the nature of scientific research is to explore the unknown world and test new theories, programming languages are usually the most important interface between scientists and computers. For computer scientists, improving code execution efficiency on a given architecture and developing high level abstraction capability of the language are challenging.

3. Read the texts below and answer:

1) What does the performance of your application depend on?

2) Why is OOP gaining its popularity in comparison with other types of programming?

Types of programming languages

How fast your applications are likely to run when you put them into production use. Performance depends more on your algorithmic programming skills than the actual language. As a rule of thumb, C, C++ and Fortran are sometimes necessary because they can offer better performance than other languages – at other times they might be unwieldy for the desired purpose. One idea for unscientific “benchmarking” of the languages would be to implement a simple sorting algorithm in all of them and compare running times. This of course does not measure the performance of the actual language – since that concept does not make sense – but only the implementation. Of course it’s also not a very reliable or thorough method, but it would give an example how running times in different languages can differ.

Based languages oop, Object-Oriented Programming vs. Other paradigms

Object-oriented programming is an important programming paradigm that is gaining popularity. In object oriented programming, data structures and algorithms are integrated into units, often called classes. OOP is often contrasted with procedural programming (which uses separate algorithms and data structures). It is not strictly dependent on language: you can do OOP in languages not listed as such (C for example), and program in the procedural style in languages that are listed as OOP. Functional languages (Lisp for example) are a bit different breed – among other things, functional programming is a superset of OOP. Logic programming (Prolog), also called declarative programming, on the other hand, is not related to the other types of programming in a similar sense.

4. Work in groups of 3 (A, B, C). Read your text extract and answer the following questions:

1) What is this programming language designed for?

2) What are its advantages/disadvantages in comparison with the other programming languages?