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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All programing languages are the same in that they break down into what amounts to a few actual commands: store a number in memory, read a number from memory, do math on some one or two numbers in memory.
The differences fall into the following camps:
Low level vs High level: this refers to how “human readable” the language is, lower level programs offer greater degrees of control over exactly what the computer does at each step but higher level languages are generally easier to develop with.
Compiled vs interpreted: this is a little technical but I’ll try to be simple. At some point, the instructions need to become what’s called “machine code”, with a compiled language another program called a compiler takes the code as written and converts the whole thing into that machine code which can then be run as many times as you want, interpreted languages have a program called (you guessed it) an interpreter which converts only one line instruction at a time into machine code. Some languages fall I to the middle where a compiler makes an intermediary file that is then interpreted, but that’s overly technical for this.
Execution time: corollary to the previous one, it’s universally true that a fully compiled language will run faster than a language that is interpreted, and some languages are just very fast at doing things while others are slower.
Task specific optimization: there are sever languages that are designed to be used for particular use cases, R for example is only used for statistics but is quick both in development and execution though only for that type of task.
Install base: your browser has javascript, the fact that your browser has javascript means that everyone who wants to have their website do fancy things can count on javascript to run on your computer, similar to the “over 3 billion devices run Java” thing you see when you install or update that. This is a consideration because you probably want to be sure about how many computers will be able to run your program.
Developer get hyped: deva are people, and sometimes get excited about new things and want to try them out or push for them to get adopted by more people.
A big corporation wanted a proprietary language that they could charge for: Microsoft is responsible for a few languages, I don’t know off the top of my head if they charge you to use any of them but it’s not off the table for a company to do that sort of thing.
One of the funny things about deciding that you want to invent a new programming language is that step one is usually to lean C, and then you’ll probably realize that making a new language just isn’t worth it.
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