A computer program is usually written by a computer programmer in a programming language. A programming language is a formal constructed language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs to control the behavior of a machine or to express algorithms.
Computers programming languages is a lot, like comparing cars. There are a lot of different qualities you can measures and a lot of disagreement about what factors are important but for the most part, the qualities that matter can’t be measured. Here is my list in no particular order.
(a) Responsiveness: You know how in Excel when you change a number in a cell, all the other cells updated immediately that responsiveness. The more steps between changing the code and seeing the result of the changes, the harder it becomes to stay in the programming flow.
(b) Safety: Have you ever heard an Ocamel or Haskell programmer claim that “once it competes; H just works? It’s a bit of an exaggeration but not as much as you might think often your compile errors are pointing out real issues you need to address for the correctness of your code, and sometimes they point out issues in your whole approach that will cause you to rewrite sections of your code without ever having run the broken version.
(c) Speed: Speed appears to be the only criterion on some peoples list of features. But just because, it’s overvalued doesn’t mean it’s not important. The claims of which language is fastest are hotly contested, I will just say that some language, like C, C++, Scheme, and OCaml pay close attention to runtime performance, and some (Like Ruby) do not.
(d) Completeness: We all need libraries. Do you want to start your next project writing XML parsers and DB integrations, or do you just want to find the right library and get started? That’s what I thought.
