This content was published by Andrew Tomazos and written by several hundred members of the former Internet Knowledge Base project.

Programming Languages

Computers cannot yet understand natural human language.

The problem is that a natural language like English is quite ambigious and requires a large amount of assumed knowledge and human experience to interpret.

Computers operate in a mathematical world built on top of ones and zeros, and precise absolute meaning.

Several hundred languages have been purpose-built for easing the process of giving instructions to a computing device. There is a large spectrum of paradigms and complexity between them.

C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, C#, Lisp, Prolog to name but a few common contemporary ones.

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