Distinctive characteristics of programming languages [closed]

Question

Beyond the syntax of each language (e.g. print v. echo), what are some key distinctive characteristics to look out for to distinguish a programming language?

As a beginner in programming, I'm still confused between the strengths and weaknesses of each programming language and how to distinguish them beyond their aliases for common native functions. I think it's much easier to classify languages based on a set of distinctive characterstics e.g. OOP v. Functional.

Answer 1

There are many thing that define a PL, here I'l list a few:

• Is it procedural, OO, imperative?
• Does it has strong type checking(C#, C++, Delphi) or dynamic(PHP, Pythong, JS)
• How are references handled? (Does it hide pointers like C#?)
• Does it require a runtime (C#, Java) or is it native to the OS(C, C++)
• Does it support threads (E.g Eiffel needs extra libraries for it)

There are may others like the prescense of garbage collectors, the handling of params, etc. The Eiffel language has an interesting feature which is Design By Contract, I haven't seen this on any other language(I think C# 4.0 has it now), but it can be pretty useful if well used.

I would recommend you to take a look on Bertrand Meyer's work to get a deeper understanding on how PL's work and the things that define them. Another thing that can define a PL is the interaction level with the system, this what makes the difference between low-level languages and high-level languages.

Hope I can help

Answer 2

In a domain (imperative, functional, concatenative, term rewriting), sometimes its best to look at the presence or absence of any particular set of functionality. For example, for the main stream imperative.

1. First order functions
2. Closures
3. Built in classes, prototypical inheritance, or toolkit (Example: C++, Self/JavaScript, Lua/Perl)
4. Complex data types (more than array)
5. In-built concurrency primitives
6. Futures
7. Pass by values, pass by name, pass by reference or an combination thereof
8. Garbage collected or not? What kind?
9. Event-based
10. Interface based types, class based types, or no user types (Go, Java, Lua)

etc