A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages, like human languages, are defined through the use of syntactic and semantic rules, to determine structure and meaning respectively. From : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming language Programming language - A standard which specifies how (sort of) human readable text is run on a computer. Programming languages vary quite a lot in style (e.g. Procedural - made up of blocks run from each other, Object-Oriented - program made of a set of communicating isolated objects, Functional - everything is a function!, ...), and make some things easier than others. There are low-level languages which give you lots of control over the computer and things run quickly, or higher level where you can get the computer to do lots with little work but have less total control, however these catagories aren't fixed. Examples include C, FORTRAN, Perl, Python, BASIC, Pascal, FORTH. From : http://www-xray.ast.cam.ac.uk/~jss/lecture/computing/notes/out/glossary/