Eli5: What is the difference between various programming languages? Dont they all do the same thing?
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My friend summed it up like this:
“If you’re writing in C++, you’ll spend 9 months writing the code and it will take 3 months to run. If you’re writing in Python, you’ll spend 3 months writing the code, but it will take 6 months to run.”
Different languages are better suited for different tasks. Some are very complex and detailed, but allow you to be very efficient. Others hide some details from you and instead save a lot of your time. And there are also some things that we just have to live with, like compatibility. If your company has been writing software in this one language for years, transitioning into something else is extremely costly, so you stick to that language even if there are better options out there.
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