What's the story with all these different languages? What the difference and what do they all do?
What's the difference between english, french, esperanto, flemish, magyar, spanish, italian, mandarin, japanese...
Just happened...
All the different languages came about because there were so many different processors on the market years ago and they were largely all incompatable with one another.
So people wrote many different versions of CoBOL, ForTran, AlgoL etc... etc... so that they could port their code around from place to place.
They were also designed to perform specific tasks. ForTran for example stands for Formula Translation and was designed to assist in the scientific arena. Another was LISP which was a language with a precursor to fuzzy logic and had the makings of artificial intelligence inside it.
It was crap but it worked after a fashion.
You have to bear in mind that this was decades ago and there was no homogeneity in the industry at all.
Nowadays if you say you're a programmer then you're almost certain to be programming Intel processors fitted to PCs.
Back then you could have been programming RML380Z machines in Assembly, TI994/A in BASIC or Dragon 32 machines in 6502 machine code or any amount of other machines all with different processors.
All of which are incompatable with each other.
