How do I classify programming languages?

Question

what are the main differences or things in common that most popular languages have?what criteria is used to classify them?

Answer 1

So huge & lengthy answers... guys we r learning programming here not literature... lol!!

Answer 2

That's a great question, but not an easy one to answer succinctly. A person could take a whole college level class dedicated to understanding different classifications of programming languages. Here's a summary of some popular paradigms:

Object-oriented (Java, Python, C#): functionality is divided into classes, which may be instantiated as objects and may have their methods invoked.

Functional (Scheme, Haskell): prefers not to save data to objects. Defines functions that can be executed.

Logic (Prolog, Datalog): rather than functions or objects, defines clauses of formal logic to apply.

This is a very incomplete list. Many of these languages are actually multi-paradigm languages that support more than one paradigm.

For more reading, the Wikipedia page on programming paradigms is a great place to start. (^^)v

Answer 3

@*** well those helped me understanding the answer and you cannot give a complete answer in a few lines ;)

Answer 4

Nobody tries this in modern era, the correct approach is: How easy is achieve the software on X device.

Now of course are procedural languages, functional, logic, academic, .... is a big list of non practical a doubtful approach. A waste of time only valid in old universities

Reason: You try to set a X language like javascript on a category but other people disagree because every language is a world( own special features ).

Answer 5

it's pretty simple, programming languages are classified according to the generation they were produced, we have the first generation languages which basically is called the machine language, second generation languages is also called the assembly language an improvement and effort to make the language more user friendly hence easy to code and debug, third generation languages are good and examples are like ada, basic, cobol and c, then came the forth generation languages that allowed one to design programs from forms more like visual basic and pascal delphi, fifth generation languages brough about the concept of artificial intelligence that allowed to create programs that could mimic human intelligence, object oriented languages borough about the concept of encapsulation where by programs contained modules, each model had a state which contained data in it, examples include java and small talk, finally, we have web design languages such as html and the scripting languages.
Basically all these generations fall under low level programming languages i.e. first and the second generation programming languages, the other generations fall under high level programming languages.
I think this is the best classification of programming languages, hope you get satisfied with it. Thank you

Answer 6

You can also separate between script languages and system languages.

Script languages are used for writing small programs, mostly assisting another one. Because of their simplified syntax you can write code with then faster but are limited in some aspects. Script languages are for example javaScript, PHP or Perl.

System languages need less CPU calls to execute processes so they are mostly used for big programs. Examples are C++ or Java