These languages were written in machine language, the semantics of these languages is very far from that of natural languages utilized by humans (no concessions are made for human frailties), hence making these first generation languages very esoteric to understand and write. As a result the programs were almost impossible to maintain because they were so prone to errors and when these errors surfaced, which was an extremely frequent occurrence. The errors were more difficult to track and correct than writing the program itself. Simple programs took extremely long periods of time to code, programs created and machine languages were not very portable, meaning they were extremely hardware dependant. Programmers needed a great deal of skill and specialized training, this made finding such programmers very difficult and the cost of hiring them astronomic. Because mainly scientist and engineers used the system, projects were mostly military sponsored, monitor screens were monochromatic and only command driven interfaces were available these systems were not very usable to the average man, however these languages suited their era in that, early computers ran vacuum tube technology and hardware design was in
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Second Generation languages lead to slow software development process as they do not support conceptual modeling, coding is extremely difficult and debugging is a pain staking activity but because these languages allow you manipulate individual bits and bytes, program can be very efficient and occupy less space compared to third, fourth and fifth generation languages. Examples of fourth generation of languages are IBM's ADRS2, APL, CSP and AS, Power Builder, Access.
As a result you find that these languages are able to code programs that are specifically tailored to the users needs hence making the programs created very appropriate. Despite all these benefits these programs have to be compiled ( non-isomorphic translation) and hence programs written in these languages will run slower than those generated in first and second generation languages, also when runtime errors occur the program will crash (they do not allow you to alter the code during run time and continue running the program), this could lead to lost of critically important information. Since these programming languages are standardized, the programs written are generally independent of hardware.
The main difference between third and fourth generation languages is that fourth generation languages specifies the inputs and outputs required, these non procedural languages use natural or English-like statements to code programs, hence making programs unbelievably simple to write, that now even the average computer user with very little technical knowledge of the code syntax can create usable programs. Imagine the programmer how much easier debugging would be now since you produce meaningful documentation while coding; this documentation is vital in understanding the system to trace errors. Source-code libraries of system routines are provided online, by operating systems and by fourth generation applications, this has afforded programmers the luxury of reusing their code, or code provided by the system, where suitable and necessary. its infancy, these computers would have obviously been unable to run more advanced programming languages.
Second Generation Languages
Assembly Languages had many advantages, for example: meaningful names could now be assigned to variables, memory locations and instructions, this gave the programmer an idea of what different variables stored and how they were interrelated. Prototypes can be created quickly in these languages to stimulate intelligible responses from the future users of the system. These programs can squander computer resources particularly at runtime, they do not always make the best use of processing power and storage, this may be insignificant in a small program, however in large businesses where hundreds of people are employed and thousands of interrelated files are stored such programs can incur, so serious a cost that may lead to bankruptcy.
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