Programming Languages Research

1. Why did we move from punch cards to programming languages? What does that tell you about the purpose of programming languages?

Punch cards take a long time to write and were very prone to error due to how easy it is to mess up. Receiving and output after submitting a program usually took an hour. These limitations eventually lead to the creation of programming languages where most of these problems would be solved.

Source: https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2023/11/in-bad-old-days-we-had-punchcards-how.html

2. There are hundreds of different programming languages out there. Why do you think we need so many?

There are problems that not every programming language can easily solve. Thus, many developers employ different programming languages depending on their need.

3. What are some drawbacks of a programming language you use? How would you like it to be different? Think of specific examples.

One drawback of Python is that the built-in methods don’t follow any naming conventions. Which might seem insignificant but in the long-term can start to be annoying. From what I’ve heard, there are some other weird conventions the python follows so I suppose we’ll see.

4. If you were going to create a new programming language, how would you start? What do you need to define?

I would start with the problems that most programming languages face and specialize in them. There's no reason to create something that already exists. Unless you can improve upon it significantly.