What Is Second Generation (Programming) Language (2GL)?

In the earliest days of computing, programmers had to write their programs in binary. It was a time not unlike the Dark Ages when people struggled to communicate with one another, and there was little hope for anyone who dared venture out into the world. But then came 2GLs—programming languages that are easy enough to understand by humans and can thus be written symbolically in English (also known as mnemonics). These programs are then converted into machine language by an assembler. The first generation of programming languages (1GLs) was invented before 2GLs, but they weren't nearly as easy for humans to use. 1GLs were written entirely in binary and required much more work from the programmer. It makes it easier to write and read code. However, 2GLs are not machine-specific and must be translated into machine language before a computer system can execute them. Assembly language is a computer programming language specific to a particular architecture or CPU type. For example, there are different assembly languages for x86, PowerPC, and ARM processors. Assembly languages are low-level programming languages that programmers use to write programs for computers. They are the step between machine language (1GL) and higher-level programming languages (3GL, 4GL, etc.). Assembly languages allow programmers to perform complex tasks by writing more complicated code than they would have been able to write in machine language. When you're writing a program, it's nice to be able to use language that makes sense to humans. After all, we're talking about the human brain here! But computers don't understand English—they only understand machine language. So we must translate our human-friendly program into something a computer can know before running it. It is where an assembler comes in. An assembler takes your human-readable code and converts it into something a machine can read. This machine-readable code is called assembly language, so you'll often hear people talk about "assembling" their code.