Eli5: What is the difference between various programming languages? Dont they all do the same thing?
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there is a lot of difference. first you have to compare between interpreter and compiler languages. think about it as you have got a helper from mars who only speaks martian. you have a list of things to do written in your language. now you can translate the list line by line and tell the martian every line. the advantage is that he can start at once, but it is slow. that is an interpreter language. if you use a compiler language, the whole text is translated in martian. so you helper can work much faster, because he does not have to wait for the translation, but he has to wait, until the whole text is translated.
the second thing to compare is the languages style. there are old languages that work like buying lists. if you write down milk, butter, if bread is on sale, bring 2 is a supermarket language, you can program your little brother with. another style is object oriented language. one day, some clever people thought, there has to be a programming language that works like the real word. so they invented object oriented programming. the thin with object oriented programming is that you create a thing and give it properties and procedures. lets look at you little brother. he is an object already, he has got a hight and a weight and a haircolor wich are his properties. now you can teach him how to buy milk, bread and butter, these are his procedures. and when you want him to buy milk you can call his milkbuyprocedure with brother.milk. this sounds more complicated, because we are more familiar with the buying list, but with object oriented programming, you can clone your brother, you can send one to buy milk, one to buy bread and one to buy butter.
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