Programming Languages (High-Level Languages)

Most software written today is written in high-level languages.  There are many and some are quite old.  COBOL, FORTRAN, and Lisp were written in the 1950s!!!  Higher-level languages make it easier to describe the pieces of the program you are creating.  They abstract away the specifics of the microprocessor in your computer.  Most come with large sets of common stuff you need to do, called libraries.

In this introduction to programming, you will work with two computer languages: Logo and Java.  Logo comes from Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  Seymour Papert, a scientist at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, championed the computer programming language in the 70s.  Java is one of the newest programming languages.  It appeared in 1995 just as the Internet was starting to get lots of attention.  Java was invented by James Gosling, working at Sun Microsystems.  It's sort-of a medium-level language.

With Logo, you will be able to write computer programs quickly and easily since it is a very simple language.  Once you have some experience with it, you will move to writing programs in Java.