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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Subjective aside, each language has an origin, structure, and “original intent”. These three features create a unique character to each language.
Since all programming metaphors involved cars, consider this…
A shopping trolley is designed to be pushed and steered from behind. A horse cart is designed to be pulled; so is a Surry; so is a rickshaw. A car is steered like the shopping trolley but the wheels are turned to make the direction changed instead of casterring in response to torque at the rear.
Each vehicle has a unique character for a subtly government function. They can each carry different
Loads in different conditions in a uniquely optimal way that none of the others can service ideally.
Some languages are as dangerous as a band saw, best assayed by a skilled programmer of tight diligence coercing the physical world (C, assembly, Verilog, etc.). Another language might be safe as houses, even coddling the programmer, so that they can focus on high maths most programmers could never understand (Matlab). Erlang is safe in a different way, designed to crash and restart in a very fast and predictable way and replace running code in a running system on demand so that Erickson telephone equipment will keep running no matter what. Fourth is brittle but infinitely recursive, designed to run in the tiny footprint of a telescope controller in the sixties, destined to be reborn as Postscript, which allows unlimited graphical imaging on anemic processors that could fit in printers in 1986. It the Pascal P-System that runs the Voyager spacecraft (launched in the 70s) because it’s can never crash, from which the Java virtual machine was largely cribbed.
There’s a large clump in the middle of the pack.
And every few years pundits make money writing books and articles claiming some new language is the final best language.
The clever programmers learned to translate ideas into at least a handful of languages so that the best language for a job can be pulled into position.
It’s a very soft set of distinctions and opinions.
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