What Language?

What Task?

Programming: Creating

What is involved in writing a computer program?
What kinds of decisions must be made?
Who is involved?
Is it hard?
(I'll bet you can guess the answer to that last one!)

The process of creating a computer program is not as straight-forward as you might think. It involves a lot of thinking, experimenting, testing, and rewriting to achieve a high-quality product. Let's break down the process to give you an idea of what goes on.

The first decision to make when creating a computer program is:
What is this program supposed to do?

The more detailed this description is, the easier it will be to get good results.

The choice of what computer language to use has important consequences for how easy the program will be to write and maintain. The graphic shows some of the most commonly used languages and what tasks they are usually used for.

The languages are grouped by how complex they are for the writer. The simplest with the least power are at the bottom. Simple languages for simple tasks. (But how simple is any of this, really??)

Things to consider in choosing a language

Works with what you've got -

• Existing standards in your company
• Existing hardware
• Existing software with which to interact
• Programmers' current knowledge

Will work in the future -

• With variety of hardware
• Changes easy to make in programs
• Errors easy to find in programs

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23