Beginning Software Engineering, 2nd Edition

12Programming Languages

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

—Dennis Ritchie

The C language combines all the power of assembly language with all the ease-of-use of assembly language.

—Mark Pearce

What You Will Learn in This Chapter:

• Why you cannot always pick your language
• Language generations: 1GL, 2GL, 3GL, 4GL, and (you guessed it) 5GL
• Language families such as imperative, procedural, declarative, functional, and object-oriented
• Considerations for picking a language

It seems that a programming language, once created, never dies. It may go dormant for a while, but sooner or later some hobby programmer will disinter it from a dusty archive or ancient cyber-tomb just to experiment with it.

There are hundreds of different programming languages floating around in the aether waiting for you to discover them. There are thousands if you count all of the variations, dialects, and idioms. Sometimes languages spawn new versions through improvement over time while older versions persist because they are still in use by older programs. Other times dialects are invented to work for a very narrowly defined problem. For example, Emacs Lisp is a Lisp-based scripting language used inside the Emacs text editor. (Emacs may seem like a strange name, but it's much better than what it originally stood for: Editor MACroS.)

This chapter provides background so you'll know what it means if a team member says that you should use a low-level 5GL language ...