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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To give another analogy, let’s talk about poetry and legal documents.
You can say A LOT with a simple poem. A legal document on the other hand is very verbose; you need to describe every detail to make sure there is nothing left for interpretation.
Python is one language you could relate to poetry. The language is defined in a way where you can do many things in a single line of code. This makes it quick to read and write.
C++ is another language that is in the same category of languages as python. C++ would resemble more closely a legal document. If you wanted to translate some code written in python to c++, you could get it to do the same thing, but it might be several lines longer.
So why would you ever use c++? Imagine if all of your legally binding contracts were written as poetry; there would be a lot left up to interpretation. C++ as a language is built to give the programmer specific control over what the computer is doing. You can write code to explicitly define what a piece of information is and how it should be used.
These are just two different programming languages within a broader category of “object oriented” programming languages.
While these programing languages describe how to do something, there’s another category of programming languages called Functional programming languages. Programs written in these languages describe what something should look like.
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