What is a programming language?

When we want to communicate with someone, we need a language. A language that the other person can understand. When we interact we either speak or use sign language or write on paper or on chat messages to interact. We have several languages among humans like - Hindi, English, French, Tamil, etc.

In the same way, we need languages that machines can understand. There are several of them too like - C++, Javascript, Java, etc.

How do you learn a language? You read books, watch tutorials, make notes and talk to other people for practice and become more fluent. That’s how you would learn a programming language too but how does the computer learn a certain programming language? The answer is us. We help them in learning a programming language. Just like we read a book, we give computers a book(by downloading the language in the system) and because it is a machine( must faster than human brains in doing operations), it learns the language as soon as we download it for the machine to read.