Eli5 why are there so many computer languages?

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Why are there things like c++ and python when computers have to be programmed. Why does there need to be so many languages when one could solve it?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Different programming languages are designed to achieve different goals. A couple of examples:

Python’s design goal is to be a versatile language that’s easy to read and can get things up and running with relatively lower time investment from the programmer. There are trade-offs to this approach though. Python trades-off runtime speed and memory efficiency to achieve these goals.

C++’s design goal is to be a versatile language that empowers the developer to focus on the speed and efficiency of their code. It trades off ease-of-use and readability to accomplish this. C++ programs often require much more time investment from the programmer compared to an equivalent program written in Python.

It’s more complex than that in reality, but the point here is that there are trade-offs that have to be made to promote certain design goals (at the expense of others). There are different programming languages because which trade-offs you want to make will vary a lot depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.

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