There are many programming languages?What are the differences?

Question

There's C,C++,Java,Pascal,FORTRAN,COBOL,BASIC,Python,perl,ruby,Matlab,Mathematica and tons of languages

But what is the actual difference and why many programming languages are necessary

Answer 1

Over time, what we do when we program has changed, as has the amount of knowledge which is required. Originally we had languages which simplified things drastically but were close to assembly -- most of the cobol interpreters and compilers I've seen stored numbers as characters as in '34' rather than the numeric value thirty four. At about the same time an alternative model of programming, called List Processing, led to the introduction of the language LISP which has always been used in Artificial Intelligence. At the end of the sixties a guy named Edward Dijkstra wrote about something called Structured Programming and Donald Knuth began his multivolume Programming Algorithms. These redefinitions of style (and of what made sense: as an artist I am supposed to subscribe to the definition of style as what you get when someone functions at the limits of their competence, and it fits here. Dijkstra's explanations about why to avoid goto in code extended the competence of most programmers) influenced the next generation of languages, Pascal which was created for teaching programming and C, which was born with UNIX, implement VERY similar concepts using radically different syntax -- pascal was aimed at cs students, c at engineers. They did not have a monopoly on computer users, and Seymour Papert and the team which is essentially behind OLPC retooled LISP into a kiddie language called Logo at about the same time. Around 1976 some AI hackers came up with a new Programming paradigm in a language called SmallTalk. Object Oriented. Suddently everyone wanted an Object Oriented language. Fortran and Cobol got it, C got C++ and Object C (from NeXT Computers-- Jobs's project when he was off Apple) Pascal got Delphi from Borland Software and Modula-2 Modula-3 and Oberon from its inventor Nicholas Wirth. But I'm a little ahead of myself. What sold microcomputers, which drove the next round of programming developments was a little interpreter written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen called Microsoft BASIC, which was an implementation of a language developed at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire which allowed non-computer scientists to program. There were other implementations, such as Apple Basic, which many of the first computer games were written in, but really Microsoft BASIC on CP/M and later MS-DOS computers got many many people into programming.



Suddenly everyone started getting graphics cards and screens which could display things almost as well as our tvs (as opposed to computers like the Apple and the Vic 20 which used TVs as monitors usually, and that drove the next implementations: cheap versions of Logo and a graphic-knowing OOP language like Java. Microsoft decided to make Basic upscale and replaced it with Visual Basic as Netscape came out of the UNIX world introducing the Graphical Web Browser (the Linux kernel had been invented shortly before and I used it on a Slackware Linux -- network at a school that couldn't afford to buy UNIX to give its students netscape before it became available for Windows) and it introduced the interpreted languages javascript and, as Microsoft reacted, vbscript. Tk/Tcl came out of the Unix World as well. Based on Lisp, it's an interpreted language which works with your graphic user interface: originally X-Windows but it got ported over to Windows very early. It's not talked about these days anywhere near as much as it's used: if you took the Tk/TCL code out of Ubuntu you would have a lot of unhappy users trying to figure out what happened to their OSes. SPSS is an awsome statistical package, Mathmatica an awesome math package. Both are proprietary like Visual Basic. And Microsoft has developed more packages which are intended to be run on Windows. Every time a new problem kicks up, someone is around with a new solution. That's why there are so many programming languages.

Answer 2

Different languages are suited for different things - they are simply tools.

Answer 3

http://www.jvoegele.com/software/langcomp.html