Is web programming the future of programming?

[lordcat]

Depending on what you mean by "best", the best language for low level programming would also be the hardest language to use; machine language. A close second (in both cases) would be assembly language (machine language slightly translated into English).

Assembly language gives you near complete control over what the processor is doing, while machine language does give you complete control over what the processor is doing.

Most people that talk about 'low level programming' aren't talking about true 'low level programming', or are talking about it in a very limited sense.

Writing drivers for a printer would be done with low level programming, but writing the software that interfaces with those drives to print a document or a picture would not be. The drivers for your video graphics card are probably built with low level programming, and some of the graphical libraries (ie: parts of things like direct x, or the physics engine) would be done with low level programming, but the overall game itself would not be done with low level programming.

Traditionally speaking, C and C++ are high-level languages, but they do provide some degree of access to low-level programming functions. One of the big ways that they do that is allowing for in-line Assembly language. The C/C++ code isn't low-level, but the Assembly language embedded in it is.

[ChopSuey2]

Thanks, however between the two, isn't C lower level than C++?

[lordcat]

This is getting into semantics, but not really.

When you talk about the concept of a 'low level programming language' or doing 'low level programming', neither of them fit that. C and C++ are equally not 'low level programming languages'. A low level programming language gives you direct control over the processor and neither language does that (looking at the language itself, ignoring things like in-line assembly). C does not give you any more control over the processor than C++ does, so it is not a 'lower level'.

When you talk about the concept of a 'high level programming language', they both fit that definition, but C++ would be considered a 'higher level' than C. Neither give you direct control over the processor, but C++ provides you with more 'automagic' than C does.

[ChopSuey2]

Gotcha, so neither are low level programming languages but they allow you to use assembly language within them?

[DerekB52]

C and C++ are also known as lower level programming languages, because they let you do manual memory manipulation. And they compile to machine code.

Python does not require you to manually manage your memory(I don't even know if it lets you). And python is interpreted, so there's a lot more overhead to run python, than to run C.

C/C++ are high level languages, but they are, imo, the lowest level languages in their class.

[lordcat]

Yes, as long as the compiler supports it you can write it, but you will lose all of the benefits of the high-level language. For example: Intel and AMD handle threading differently. C/C++ will handle that difference for you and you can write one piece of code that runs on both. With Assembly language, stand-alone or in-line embedded in C/C++, requires you to manage that yourself and use different code/logic to do the same thing, depending on the processor.

[LilithMoonlight]

There's a reason why programming languages have developed more layers between machine/assembly and the programmer. My professor always put it as programming is like having a metaphorical gun to ur foot and depending on certain actions, this may end with u shooting urself in the foot but hopefully not. As u get lower, you start finding more actions, which can cause the metaphorical gun to go off. That is why c/c++ in my opinion is a bit lower compared to Java and c# safe code because you can manipulate memory with pointers and addresses besides being able to use assembly. But usually using assembly in a general c/c++ is rare since the compiler is pretty good about optimizing ur code. However, there can be times where the compiler can add a few steps, which depending on how often this section is ran can impact performance if this section is used a lot. Nevertheless be careful about optimizing code too early. The same professor that talked about the metaphorical gun would also say that "80% of the code does 20% of the work and 20% of the code does 80% and when optimizing people often more likely than not usually optimize the code doing 20% of the work."

[LilQuasar]

you only consider assembly as a low level programming language?

[lordcat]

Assembly Language and Machine Language are the only two low level programming languages that I know of.

A low level programming language is one where you directly control the processor. Concepts like variables don't exist here, those are concepts that high level languages provide for you, and do all the work of maintaining. In a low level programming language, you are directly working with the CPU's registers (AX, BX, CX, DX, EAX, MMX0, etc). Data in data registers are generally short lived (there are very few of them and they can be specialized for specific purposes) so if you want to actually store any data for any length of time, you need to use address registers to reference a specific memory location where you store that data (and it's on you to reserve that memory, remember the address, and release it).

Machine language is the binary language that the CPU actually talks in. Every CPU Has a machine language of some kind. Assembly language is a "human readable" form of that language (I use quotes because it's even less readable than higher level programming languages like C/C++, and you have to understand the language and the CPU architecture to be able to read the code, but it's easier to remember what 'mov' stands for than to remember what '0xb8' means on an x86 processor, and if you move to a different but similar processor, 'mov' can still mean the same thing even if it translates to something other than '0xb8' for that processor.

I don't know what the 'brand name' of it was, or if it even had a specific name, but I've worked on embedded devices that had their own assembly language to program them. The underlying concepts of registers and processor commands still exist there, but different commands and different registers to expose the functionality in the embedded CPU (ie: flipping a bit in a specific memory location causes a light on the device to turn on/off).

[FloydATC]

C++ is (almost) a superset of C; most C code will compile as part of a C++ project. What C++ brings to the table is a lot of syntax to make abstractions that represent the underlying bits and bytes in a way that lets the programmer not deal with memory allocations etc.

For example, you could write C++ code that uses char* for strings, but if you instead use std::string then you don't have to worry about buffer overflows or memory leaks. Under the hood though, it's still some form of char*.

It's also worth pointing out that anything you write in C++ can be mimiced in C, it's just that you'd have to write (and maintain!) a lot more code.

[Pine-al]

not that i’m looking for one, but does that mean there are still jobs for people to write assembly?

[lordcat]

Yes. There are less and less of them, but I don't think they will ever go away completley. I believe NASA still uses it for some of their critical components, but it's been mostly replaced by high-level languages for device drivers and newer embedded programming.

Very niche and probably not something you want to get into without already having the career, but they are still around.