Weekly Questions 1

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

Punch cards could only store a very limited amount of data (80 bytes each), so bigger programs would require multiple cards in big stacks.
If a character was mis-punched on a card, it would need to be re-punched.
Because the cards had to be inserted into the machine in order, if a stack of cards was dropped, it would have to be reordered, which was tedious and took a lot of time.
The machines themselves were quite slow.
Magnetic tape & disk drives were more compact and allowed for faster processing.

Programming languages were often created for early computers (including punch-card computers) as:

Machines only operated in purely binary, mechanical language, and could not understand human commands.
It is hard for humans to read pure binary operations, and attempting to do so may lead to errors that are hard to find and wasted calculation time.
Assembly languages, and later higher-level languages served to make programs more readable for people while allowing computers to execute them.

Different programming languages were invented to address the needs of multiple different specific purposes and jobs - e.g. Java was created for websites, MATLAB for mathematical programs, Python for readability, et cetera.
Different jobs have different programming languages that work best for them, so there are multiple programming languages to satisfy multiple varying needs.

Python float number operations don't always work properly because of limitations in memory (this is a limitation of many programming languages in general, though), so I would say expanding the storage of a number to improve the accuracy of float operations would be an improvement.
Numbers ending in .5 are rounded to the nearest even integer instead of consistently up, known as banker's rounding, due to international standards for code.
Because Python is interpreted, it is quite slow, as it reads and checks each individual line before executing, which is not ideal for heavier programs.
Python is relatively memory-intensive for a programming language, which once again makes it slower with larger programs.

The target audience (experienced programmers, newbie programmers, teachers, students, etc)
What purpose it serves / problem it solves
The syntax (“grammar”) of the language and the functions that come with it
If it should be interpreted (executed as it reads the program) or compiled (translates it into a file before executing)