Learning programming languages is becoming an essential part of education. With learning these different languages, it is important to understand what they are, how they function and when they can be applied to real world scenarios. As someone who is seeking a career in software engineering, I think these tools are a great foundation to learning how to build programs.
This was my first time using Scratch. I’ve never even heard of this website before. Initially, I watched the tutorial videos to get an idea of how Scratch worked. I also did the activities in the textbook as I read though the sections. To my surprise, those activities gave me a better understanding of programming. The activities focused on machine language, assembly language and high-level languages, like Python.
Machine language is the instructions given to the CPU, for it to perform a task. These instructions are given in 0’s and 1’s because that's the only language a CPU understands. If I wanted to program a light switch to perform on and off tasks, I would use machine language. Assembly language is, “a textual human-understandable representation of a machine language's 0's and 1's, as in: Add M[5] M[6] M[7],” (Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S., 2019). When I’m able to read and understand the language from a program displayed to me, that is using assembly language. The next type of language discussed were high-level languages, such as Python, C++, Java, etc. These languages can be used to build entire programs. Some of the activities in the text were using Python. “Python is a high-level programming language, increasing in popularity due in part to being easy to learn, to being freely available, and to having powerful high-level data-processing operations,” (Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S., 2019). The assembly language was the easiest for me to grasp. However, Python was quite easy and rewarding, once I got the hang of it. The same can be said for when I finished my program in Scratch. Scratch was even easier to use because the website already has the instructions with labels corresponding to different actions. There wasn’t a need to think into how I was going to build this program, but more like, what type of program I was going to build. With Python, I feel like I would spend a lot of time trying to figure out how I was going to build a program. Scratch is limited, though. I was confined into only what was available on Scratch. Whereas, in Python, I have reigns to do whatever I want.
Figuring out how to build my program made me feel like I accomplished something huge. Especially since I plan on going into the field of software engineering, completing tasks like this show me that I am able to do code and create programs. Learning the history and basic functions of these programming languages gives me more insight on
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