The earliest programmable machine was Al-Jazari's programmable humanoid robot in 1206. This robot was originally a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties.
Joseph Marie Jacquard invented the Jacquard Loom in 1801 which used punched cards. The hole pattern of the card represented the pattern that the loom had to follow in weaving cloth. The loom could produce entirely different weaves using different sets of cards.
In 1944, the real dawn of the computer age started when the Mark I was completed. A team of Harvard and IBM scientists led by Howard Aiken made this Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). This electro-mechanical computer was much more reliable than early electronic computers.
In the beginning every model of computer would likely use different instructions (machine language) to do the same task. Later, assembly languages were developed so the programmer didn't have to remember the numeric codes and calculate addresses as in the first generation languages. Assembly languages allowed the programmer to easier access the hardware of the computer. They were also easier to use than the high level machine languages. Machine languages are more portable than the assembly languages meaning that you could use the high level languages on more than one computer.
Think of the programming process like a recipe for how to make a banana split. First, you need to decide what ingredients you need and then gather them together. Likewise, when writing a program you need decide what kind of program it's going to be and gather data.
Second, peel a banana, cut it in half lengthwise and put the two halves of the banana in a long, skinny ice cream bowl. That's like organizing the data into a usable format.
Now put three scoops of ice cream (chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla) on top. This demonstrates three various uses of data. Word is a program in which you can add data (text), delete data, and manipulate data. In your program you can allow your user to do this.
Next, put some hot fudge on your chocolate scoop of ice cream. Maybe you could add a picture to your Word document.
Pouring pineapple syrup on the vanilla scoop is like adding a chart to your story.
When you add some strawberry syrup to the strawberry scoop, it's like adding sounds to your writing.
Top your banana split with whipped cream, a few cherries, and some nuts and you've uniquely designed the ice cream treat. Word allows you to change the font, size, and color of your text.
Serve your banana split and eat it, or save your program and run it.
Programming languages are used to write programs. They write the instructions for the computer to do something. Programs have virtually unlimited uses. You can use a program to ask for a username and password or a program could welcome a member to a website. There could be a program to give the user a random number or construct a banana split. The world has been changed by computers, computer programs, and programming languages.
Author's Note: This is the Narrative to my project on Computer Programming.
Owen and I just recently finished our Computer Codes project. For the most part our project went as planned. My favorite part of the project was when Owen and I got to make our own computer games using the Python programming language. We had to extend the project date back about a week and a half because of meeting with our expert and our Animoto. We found our expert at the beginning of the project but didn't contact him until later. By the time we met with him, the project was almost over. Here are my goals for my next project:
- Find and contact expert right away in the project.
- Find more written sources.
