Over the past 50 years, computer programming languages have made several significant advancements all focused on making a computer easier to use in a more human-readable format. If you wanted to learn programming in the early days you would have had to learn Assembly Language, a set of binary machine operation codes that instructed the microprocessor how to perform each step. This was extremely tedious work; something as simple as adding two numbers and storing the results could take as many as six steps, i.e. six operation codes.
Then computer engineers started creating compilers and function based programs that allowed for a more readable format, so a compiler could convert a function like “int sum(int a, int b)” into the operations codes required for the microprocessor. As the technology grew, more and more languages were created, each making programming easier yet still requiring a strict syntax required to instruct the compiler how to perform a specific task.