What makes different programming languages “better” than others? Or more powerful? Why have different languages developed over time? Are they all based on the same thing?
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Some languages are better suited to particular tasks than others, basically (any decent programmer ought to be able to pick up just about any language with appropriate training). As examples, there are times when you want to work directly with actual locations in computer memory. Equally, there are times when that’s the last thing you want – you want to be able to install your code on a completely different design of computer, so you DON’T want to be making any assumptions about how your computer works. Or there are times when you want to do very mathematical things, so you want to use a language that understands and supports that sort of thing; but equally there are times when what you want to do is mostly business logic, which tends to be more about shuffling information about from (say) one file/database to another, only doing mostly fairly basic arithmetic. Or there are times when you really want to be heavily in charge of how fast the code is working, and even precisely when the code does particular things, which may mean doing “clever”, complicated things in a language designed for that sort of task – but equally the biggest programming cost for most businesses is maintaining and changing old code, so you also want it to be as easy to understand and modify well as possible. Oh, and you don’t want to spend a fortune training every new programmer up in something obscure they’ve never met before, ideally, but nor do you want the (significant) costs that come with using lots of different languages within the same business.
It’s horses for courses, basically. You pick a set of languages that will broadly meet your needs.
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