Diversity of Programming Languages

There are several reasons why someone will develop a new language. It might be that a person used a programming language but did not find the structure good enough, or they thought that some things could be done more efficiently. Another reason could be that a language is developed to target a special kind of application. Later in this course, we’ll take a look at some of the different types of applications, and these might have some requirements that make one language better suited to meet them than other languages will.

A programming language can give a programmer direct access to a computer’s hardware. It lets the programmer have more control over how data will be represented and stored in the computer’s memory. The benefit of this is that programs written in this sort of language have the potential of being more efficient or running faster. However, this comes at the cost of complexity. When more control is given to the programmer, we ...