You should write code in a high-level programming language because it is the best way to express your ideas.
If you can express your ideas in a high-level programming language, and you have any choice about what language to use, you should use that high-level language.
Why? Because:
1. It’s easier to read and understand code written in a high-level language than code written in a low-level language like assembly or machine code.
2. It’s easier to write and maintain code written in a high-level programming language than code written in a low-level language like assembly or machine code.
3. High-level languages are level agnostic, meaning they can be used on any level; the same source can be compiled for different levels of abstraction while low-level languages are not as flexible.
4. The compiler or interpreter will do all the heavy lifting for us by compiling or interpreting our code into assembly before running it as machine instructions, so we don’t have to do all that hard work ourselves.
5. We can focus on solving the problem at hand without being bogged down by thinking about how many instructions need executed per second and where those instructions need placed within memory for optimal performance (which is
Python is an interesting language. It is one of the few languages with a strong focus on code readability, which makes it a great language for beginners to learn and use. In this article I will discuss why you should choose to write code in a high-level programming language and why Python is the perfect choice!
The advantages of using a high-level programming language are clear. The lower the level of programming, the more obscure the code. You should write in a high level programming language because it is less time consuming and the code is easier to understand.
A high-level language allows you to write code that is closer to natural English or another human language. A computer programmer can easily read and understand what the code does, even if he or she does not know how to modify it. This is because a high-level language uses words and symbols that are familiar to humans.
Writing code in a high-level language is a better idea than trying to write everything in assembly language. Assembly language is extremely low level, which means it provides the programmer with very little abstraction from the underlying hardware. In fact, the entire purpose of assembly language is to provide an almost one-to-one mapping between the program and the underlying machine.
The advantages of this are obvious: programs written in assembly are extremely fast and can do things that many higher level languages cannot do. But there is also a major drawback: assembly requires a lot of time, effort and skill to write. On top of that, they are hard to read and understand, which makes them difficult to debug or improve on later.
Therefore, most programmers choose to use a high-level language like C or Python instead when writing programs for normal usage (i.e., not embedded systems). These languages allow you to write code without worrying too much about how your computer understands it at first; instead you can focus more on what you want your program to do and how it should work before thinking about optimization later down the line if necessary.
The purpose of this post is to convince you that, if you are not already doing so, you should write code in a high-level programming language. I’ll give reasons why and show how to do it using the R programming language.
What is a high-level programming language?
A high-level programming language is one where the programmer, who writes code in that language, is generally further removed from the computer hardware than they would be in a low-level programming language. An analogy can be drawn with human languages: we can communicate with each other at different levels of abstraction. This can be seen in the following example. (Note: these are not exact translations of each other.)
I am hungry.
I would like some food.
I would like some Italian food.
I would like some Italian pizza.
I would like some Italian pizza with extra cheese and olives and capers, please.
Each sentence gets more specific as we move down the list but also gets longer and more complicated to read/write and understand for both the writer and reader. But even though we go into extra detail about our desired meal in the last sentence, we still don’t have enough information for our waiter to prepare it for us. They need to know
Programming languages are a funny business. Usually we talk about how the language you choose affects your productivity, or how different kinds of languages help you express yourself in different ways. But these things are hard to measure, and there are lots of other factors involved.
What is easy to measure is how fast the code runs. Some languages are designed so that the code they compile is faster. So if you want your program to be as fast as possible, you might think it makes sense to use one of these low-level languages like C or C++. But for the vast majority of programs, that’s not the right choice.
There are many reasons why you should use a high-level language even if your performance might suffer a bit because of it:
1)It’s easier to write bug-free code when all you have to worry about is what your program does, and not also how it does it. When almost every line of your program could be wrong in at least two ways, it’s hard to get anything done.
2)Most programs spend most of their time doing I/O, not doing computations, so program performance is usually measured by how much I/O they do. It’s easy to
Four years ago, I was deeply in love with Python. At that time, I had just finished the algorithm class in my first year of university, where most assignments were done in C/C++. These languages were still the mainstream in the world of programming. However, they required a lot of boilerplate code compared to Python, which offered a much easier interface for carrying out similar computations. For example, you could write a function in Python that converted all the characters of a string to lowercase using “str.lower()”, whereas you would have to write a loop and compare each character with its uppercase equivalent in order to achieve this goal in C/C++. Naturally, it was an absolute pleasure to write code in Python after the extreme frustration of dealing with low-level languages for the algorithm class.
However, this happiness did not last very long. The second year of university brought me back to the realm of low-level languages (this time it was MIPS Assembly), and I started missing Python more and more. As if this wasn’t enough already, I soon realized that I had gotten used to writing code mostly for fun, but now I was expected to use these languages for every assignment from then on. It felt as if someone had