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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What makes a language better or worse:
A low level language takes a long time to write programs in, but they provide more low level control that might be useful to the programmer. These languages also tend to be less resource intensive. A high level language does a lot more computing with each line of code. These languages are good for fast development speed but they will often run far far far slower than a low level languages. In many cases this isn’t an issue because computers are unbelievably fast now. Picking a best language for a particular application requires you to determine what that language is capable of and weighing that against the needs of your project.
Summary: no language is the best per se, lots of different ones exist because they can all do different things well.
Why different ones have been developed:
Different languages have developed over time as computers have evolved and grown vastly more powerful very quickly and people have used the programming languages available at the time and decided that they wanted to make their own version with better features that the current language was missing. This is how you went from Fortran > Algol > C > C++ > Java. Each of those languages took something that was learned from the language before it, and built upon it. If you look at a family tree of programming languages it gets kinda complicated.
Are they all based on the same thing:
If you’re asking if everything gets turned to 1’s and 0’s at some point, then yes. If you’re referring to the actual program text or syntax, they’re not all related. Some of them are, you’ll hear the phrase “C syntax language” to describe languages which are syntactically similar (the words and structure in the program are the same or similar) to C like C++, java, and C#. These languages are all based on C which is based on Algol which is based on Fortran and each of those languages have multiple spin offs.
Some languages are kinda off on their own, for example: SQL is for asking databases for data, you can’t write a web page with exclusively SQL and it isn’t based on another language as far as I’m aware. HTML is only a basic markup language and it can’t do any actual big boy programming language stuff like do math or run for loops. Those are two examples of languages that are absolutely nothing like a C based language. Just to demonstrate that some are based on the same thing and some aren’t.
I did my best to explain everything in the most understandable terms that I could without leaving out too much information. I doubt that anything will see this but I had fun typing it out!
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