Why are some programming languages better for certain types of projects than other programming languages, when they can all essentially do the same thing and they all seem to work the same way?

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Why are some programming languages better for certain types of projects than other programming languages, when they can all essentially do the same thing and they all seem to work the same way?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Think about it like programming languages are on a sliding scale.

On one side are languages that are easy to write and read, can run anywhere, but are relatively slow.

On the other side are languages that are very verbose, more difficult to master, can only run on one OS, but are relatively faster.

In reality, for most things, any programming language is probably fine.

But there are tasks where readability and other concessions are of more value than the little bit of speed increase that come with more complex languages.

Think data science. Most data scientists work in Python because it’s easy to read/write and has a lot of libraries designed to help with data science.

Now think about the 3d animation software that Pixar uses. It’s very complicated to render 3d images. So complicated that one frame can take minutes or hours to render. The difference between using C and Python in this case would be absolutely massive.

While the same simple program written in C and Python would have no distinguishable difference in speed to a user, it becomes an issue of scales of magnitude in time as things become more complex.

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