Programming Languages

The most important differences between object-oriented programming languages and the generations one through four languages are: generations one through four are actual programming languages that require a programmer to follow a particular syntax when written code in order to create even the most simplest of programs. Furthermore, these languages are designed to receive data, process the data received, and return an output or command to the user. The object-oriented language on the other hand, constructs programming around objects versus processes and actual code written. In addition, the object-oriented language can be used to create menus or reuse objects for a particular application and can create classes and subclasses to follow the original class. Programmers would have to write out a code for each class and subclass. This in return, is much easier than having a programmer write out the code from scratch in order to do the same task.

No matter what generation language a programmer is using, computers only have the ability to understand and read a binary machine language, meaning computers only understand combinations of zeros and ones in order to perform a task. So programmers needs to have the knowledge to write code in either machine language; or assembly language which is simple words that will need to be converted into machine language, source code or the English language which will need a compiling tool designed to convert the English language back to machine language, or use a Structured Query Language package designed to write code and then convert the language into machine language. Moreover, machine languages are extremely difficult to use, frequently encounter errors, and are machine - CPU dependant. Object-oriented language is much easier to use, hardly ever runs into errors and can be used on a vast majority of machines due to its object-oriented ability.

A few of the similarities are: both are computer languages, languages such as C++, Java, and Smalltalk are used in both third generation and object-oriented languages, and what the object-oriented language can in fact do, the generation languages can do but with a little more time and effort.