Comparison of programming languages

Programming languages are used for controlling the behavior of a machine (often a computer). Like natural languages, programming languages conform to rules for syntax and semantics.

There are thousands of programming languages^[1] and new ones are created every year. Few languages ever become sufficiently popular that they are used by more than a few people, but professional programmers may use dozens of languages in a career.

Most programming languages are not standardized, by an international (or national) standard, even widely used ones, such as Perl (but an unrelated PEARL, has a German standard), nor is Standard ML (despite the name). Notable standardized programming languages include ALGOL, C, C++, JavaScript (under the name ECMAScript), Prolog, Common Lisp, Scheme (IEEE standard), Ada, Fortran and COBOL (SQL, HTML, XQuery and XML are also standardized).

General comparison

The following table compares general and technical information for a selection of commonly used programming languages. See the individual languages' articles for further information. Please note that the following table may be missing some information.

Language	Intended use	Imperative	Object-oriented	Functional	Procedural	Generic	Reflective	Event-driven	Other paradigm(s)	Standardized?
ActionScript 3.0	Application, client-side, web	Yes	Yes					Yes		1996, ECMA
Ada	Application, embedded, realtime, system	Yes	Yes[2]		Yes[3]	Yes[4]			concurrent,[5] distributed,[6]	1983, 2005, 2012, ANSI, ISO, GOST 27831-88[7]
Aldor	Highly domain-specific, symbolic computing	Yes	Yes	Yes						No
ALGOL 58	Application	Yes								No
ALGOL 60	Application	Yes								1960, IFIP WG 2.1, ISO[8]
ALGOL 68	Application	Yes							concurrent	1968, IFIP WG 2.1, GOST 27974-88,[9]
Ateji PX	Parallel application		Yes						pi calculus	No
APL	Application, data processing								array-oriented, tacit	1989, ISO
Assembly language	General	Yes							any, syntax is usually highly specific, related to the target processor	No
AutoHotkey	GUI automation (macros), highly domain-specific	Yes								No
AutoIt	GUI automation (macros), highly domain-specific	Yes			Yes			Yes		No
Bash	Shell, scripting	Yes			Yes
BASIC	Application, education	Yes			Yes					1983, ANSI, ISO, ECMA
BBj	Application, business, web		Yes		Yes					No
BeanShell	Application, scripting	Yes	Yes	Yes			Yes			In progress, JCP[10]
BitC	System	Yes		Yes						No
BLISS	System				Yes					No
BlitzMax	Application, game	Yes	Yes		Yes		Yes			No
Blue	Education	Yes	Yes			Yes				No
Boo	Application									No
Bro	domain-specific, application	Yes						Yes		No
C	Application, system,[11] general purpose, low-level operations	Yes			Yes					1989, ANSI C89, ISO C90, ISO C99, ISO C11[12]
C++	Application, system	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes				1998, ISO/IEC 1998, ISO/IEC 2003, ISO/IEC 2011,ISO/IEC 2014[13]
C#	Application, RAD, business, client-side, general, server-side, web	Yes	Yes	Yes[14]	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	structured, concurrent	2000, ECMA, ISO[15]
Clarion	General, business, web	Yes	Yes	Yes[16]						Unknown
Clean	General			Yes		Yes				No
Clojure	General			Yes					concurrent	No
CLU	General	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes				No
COBOL	Application, business	Yes	Yes		Yes					ANSI X3.23 1968, 1974, 1985; ISO/IEC 1989:1985, 2002, 2014
Cobra	Application, business, general, web	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes			No
ColdFusion (CFML)	Web		Yes		Yes					No
Common Lisp	General	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	extensible syntax, syntactic macros, multiple dispatch	1994, ANSI
COMAL 80	Education	Yes			Yes					No
Crystal	General purpose	Yes	Yes[17]	Yes	Yes				alpha stage[18]	No
Cython	Application, general, numerical computing	Yes	Yes	Yes			Yes		aspect-oriented	No
D	Application, system	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		generative, concurrent	No
Dart	Application, web, server-side, mobile, IoT	Yes	Yes	Yes					structured	Ecma-408 standard
Dylan	Application		Yes	Yes						No
Eiffel	General, application, business, client-side, server-side, web (EWF)	Yes	Yes	Yes[19][20]		Yes	Yes Erl-G	Yes Agents	distributed SCOOP, Void-safe	2005, ECMA, ISO[21]
Elixir	Application, distributed			Yes					concurrent, distributed	No
Erlang	Application, distributed			Yes					concurrent, distributed	No
Euphoria	Application				Yes		Yes			No
Factor									stack-oriented	No
Falcon	General, application		Yes	Yes	Yes				prototype OOP, message oriented, tabular programming	No
FP				Yes						No
F#	Application	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes				No
Forth	General	Yes		can be viewed as					stack-oriented	1994, ANSI
Fortran	Application, numerical computing	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes				1966, ANSI 66, ANSI 77, MIL-STD-1753, ISO 90, ISO 95, ISO 2003, ISO/IEC 1539-1:2010 (2008)
FreeBASIC	Application, numerical computing	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes				No
G2	Application, inference, expert system	Yes	Yes					Yes	common graphical development and runtime environment	No
Gambas	Application	Yes	Yes					Yes		No
Game Maker Language	Application, games	Yes	Yes					Yes		No
GLBasic	Application, games	Yes	Yes		Yes				simple object-oriented	No
Go	Application, web, server-side	Yes		Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes	concurrent	De facto standard via Go Language Specification
Gosu	Application, general, scripting, web	Yes	Yes			Yes	Yes			No
GraphTalk	Application		Yes						logic	No
Groovy	Application, general, scripting, web	Yes	Yes	Yes					aspect-oriented	In progress, JCP[22]
Harbour	Application, business, data processing, general, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		declarative	No
Haskell	Application			Yes		Yes			lazy evaluation	2010, Haskell 2010[23]
Haxe	Application, general, web	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes			No
HyperNext	Application, education				Yes			Yes	weakly typed	No
HyperTalk	Application, RAD, general		Yes					Yes	weakly typed	Unknown
Io	Application, host-driven scripting	Yes	Yes							No
ISLISP	General	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes				1997, ISO
J	Data processing								array-oriented, function-level, tacit	No
JADE	Application, distributed	Yes	Yes							No
Java	Application, business, client-side, general, mobile development, server-side, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	concurrent	De facto standard via Java Language Specification
Julia	General, technical computing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		multiple dispatch, meta, scalar and array-oriented, parallel, concurrent, distributed ("cloud")	No
JavaScript	Client-side, server-side, web	Yes	Yes	Yes			Yes		prototype-based	1997, ECMA
Joy	Research			Yes					stack-oriented	No
K	Data processing, business								array-oriented, tacit	Unknown
Kotlin	Application, mobile development, server-side, client-side, web	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes[24]			No
LabVIEW (G)	Application, industrial instrumentation-automation	Yes	Yes	Yes				Yes	dataflow, visual	No
Lisp	General			Yes						Unknown
LiveCode	Application, RAD, general		Yes					Yes	weakly typed	No
Logtalk	Artificial intelligence, application		Yes				Yes	Yes	logic	No
Lua	Application, embedded scripting	Yes	Yes[25]	Yes	Yes		Yes		aspect-oriented	No[26]
Maple	Symbolic computation, numerical computing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes				distributed	No
Mathematica	Symbolic language	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes				logic, distributed	No
MATLAB	Highly domain-specific, numerical computing	Yes	Yes		Yes					No
Modula-2	Application, system	Yes				Yes				1996, ISO[27]
Modula-3	Application	Yes	Yes			Yes				No
MUMPS (M)	Application, databases	Yes			Yes				concurrent, multi-user, NoSQL, transaction processing	1977, ANSI
Nim	Application, general, web, scripting, system	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		multiple dispatch, Concurrent, meta	No
Oberon	Application, system	Yes	Yes							No
Object Pascal	Application, general, mobile app, web	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	structured	No
Objective-C	Application, general	Yes	Yes				Yes		concurrent	No
OCaml	Application	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes				No
Occam	General	Yes			Yes				concurrent, process-oriented	No
Opa	Web applications	Yes		Yes		Yes			distributed	No
Oxygene	Application	Yes	Yes			Yes				No
Oz-Mozart	Application, distribution, education	Yes	Yes	Yes					concurrent, logic	No
Pascal	Application, education	Yes			Yes					1983, ISO[28]
Perl	Application, scripting, text processing, Web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes			No
PHP	Server-side, web application, web	Yes	Yes[29]	Yes[30]	Yes		Yes			No
PL/I	Application	Yes	Yes		Yes					1969, ECMA-50 (1976)
Plus	Application, system development	Yes			Yes					No
Prolog	Application, artificial intelligence								logic	1995, ISO
PureBasic	Application				Yes					No
Python	Application, general, web, scripting, artificial intelligence, scientific computing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes		aspect-oriented	"De facto" standard via Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs)
R	Application, statistics	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes					No
Racket	Education, general, scripting		Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes		modular, logic, meta	No
REALbasic	Application				Yes					Unknown
REBOL	Distributed	Yes	Yes	Yes					dialected	No
RPG	Application, system	Yes			Yes					No
Ruby	Application, scripting, web	Yes	Yes	Yes			Yes		aspect-oriented	2011(JIS X 3017), 2012(ISO/IEC 30170)
Rust	Application, system	Yes	No[31]	Yes	Yes	Yes			concurrent	No
S	Application, statistics	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes					No
S-Lang	Application, numerical, scripting	Yes			Yes					No
Scala	Application, distributed, web	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes		De facto standard via Scala Language Specification (SLS)
Scheme	Education, general			Yes						1998, R^6RS
Seed7	Application, general, scripting, web	Yes	Yes			Yes	Yes		multi-paradigm, extensible, structured	No
Simula	Education, general	Yes	Yes					Yes	discrete event simulation, multi-threaded (quasi-parallel) program execution	1968
Small Basic	Application, education, games	Yes						Yes	component-oriented	No
Smalltalk	Application, general, business, artificial intelligence, education, web	Yes	Yes		Yes		Yes	Yes	concurrent, declarative	1998, ANSI
SNOBOL	Text processing									Unknown
Standard ML	Application	Yes		Yes		Yes				1997, SML '97[32]
Swift	Application, general	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes	concurrent	No
Tcl	Application, scripting, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes		No
Visual Basic	Application, RAD, education, business, general, (Includes VBA), office automation	Yes	Yes			Yes		Yes	component-oriented	No
Visual Basic .NET	Application, RAD, education, web, business, general	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	structured, concurrent	No
Visual FoxPro	Application		Yes						data-centric, logic	No
Visual Prolog	Application	Yes	Yes	Yes				Yes	declarative, logic	No
Windows PowerShell	Administration	Yes	Yes	Yes			Yes		pipeline	No
Wolfram Language	Symbolic language	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes				logic, distributed	No
XL		Yes	Yes						concept programming	No
Xojo	Application, RAD, general, web	Yes	Yes		Yes		Yes	Yes		No
XPath/XQuery	Databases, data processing, scripting			Yes					tree-oriented	W3C 1999 XPath 1, 2010 XQuery 1, 2014 XPath/XQuery 3.0
Language	Intended use	Imperative	Object-oriented	Functional	Procedural	Generic	Reflective	Event-driven	Other paradigm(s)	Standardized?

Type systems

Failsafe I/O and system calls

Most programming languages will print an error message and/or throw an exception if an input/output operation or other system call (e.g., chmod, kill) fails, unless the programmer has explicitly arranged for different handling of these events. Thus, these languages fail safely in this regard.

Some (mostly older) languages require that the programmer explicitly add checks for these kinds of errors. Psychologically, different cognitive biases (e.g., optimism bias) may affect novice and experts alike and these omissions can lead to erroneous behavior.

Language	Failsafe I/O
Ada	Yes (exceptions)
ALGOL	Yes (exceptions or return value depending on function)
AutoHotkey	No (global ErrorLevel must be explicitly checked)
Bash	Optional[FSIO 1]
Bro	Yes
C	No[FSIO 2]
C++	No[FSIO 3]
C#	Yes
COBOL	No
Common Lisp	Yes
D	Yes
Eiffel	No – It actually depends on the library and it is not defined by the language
Erlang	Yes
Falcon	Yes
Fortran	Yes
GLBasic	No – Will generally cause program to crash
Go	Yes (unless result explicitly ignored)
Gosu	Yes
Harbour	Yes
Haskell	Yes
ISLISP	Yes
Java	Yes
Julia	Yes
Kotlin	Yes
LabVIEW	Yes
Lua	No (some functions do not warn or throw exceptions)
Mathematica	Yes
Object Pascal	Some
Objective-C	Yes (exceptions)
OCaml	Yes (exceptions)
Perl	No[FSIO 4]
Perl 6	Yes
PHP	Yes
Python	Yes
REBOL	Yes
Rexx	Yes (with optional signal on… trap handling)
RPG	No
Ruby	Yes
Rust	Yes (unless result explicitly ignored)
S	Unknown
Smalltalk	Yes
Scala	Yes[33]
Standard ML	Yes
Swift ≥ 2.0	Yes (exceptions)
Tcl	Yes
Visual Basic	Yes
Visual Prolog	Yes
Wolfram Language	Yes
Xojo	Yes
XPath/XQuery	Yes (exceptions)
Language	Failsafe I/O

1. set -e enables termination if any unchecked exit status is nonzero.
2. gcc can warn on unchecked error status. Newer versions of Visual Studio usually throw exceptions on failed I/O when using stdio.
3. g++ can warn on unchecked error status. Newer versions of Visual Studio usually throw exceptions on failed I/O when using stdio.
4. Considerable error checking can be enabled optionally, but by default Perl is not failsafe.

Expressiveness

Language	Statements ratio[34]	Lines ratio[35]
C	1	1
C++	2.5	1
Fortran	2	0.8
Java	2.5	1.5
Perl	6	6
Smalltalk	6	6.25
Python	6	6.5

The literature on programming languages contains an abundance of informal claims about their relative expressive power, but there is no framework for formalizing such statements nor for deriving interesting consequences.^[36] This table provides two measures of expressiveness from two different sources. An additional measure of expressiveness, in GZip bytes, can be found on the Computer Language Benchmarks Game.

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are designed to mimic a particular type of workload on a component or system. The computer programs used for compiling some of the benchmark data in this section may not have been fully optimized, and the relevance of the data is disputed. The most accurate benchmarks are those that are customized to your particular situation. Other people's benchmark data may have some value to others, but proper interpretation brings many challenges. The Computer Language Benchmarks Game site warns against over-generalizing from benchmark data, but contains a large number of micro-benchmarks of reader-contributed code snippets, with an interface that generates various charts and tables comparing specific programming languages and types of tests.

Timeline of specific language comparisons

• 1973 – Comparative Notes on Algol 68 and PL/I – S. H. Valentine – February 1973
• 1976 – Evaluation of ALGOL 68, JOVIAL J3B, Pascal, Simula 67, and TACPOL Versus TINMAN – Requirements for a Common High Order Programming Language.
• 1977 – A comparison of PASCAL and ALGOL 68^[37] – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – June 1977.
• 1993 – Five Little Languages and How They Grew – BLISS, Pascal, ALGOL 68, BCPL & C – Dennis M. Ritchie – April 1993.
• 2009 – On Go – oh, go on – How well will Google's Go stand up against Brand X programming language? – David Given – November 2009

See also

To display all pages, subcategories and images click on the "►":

▼ Lists of programming languages‎ (22 P)   List of programming languages   List of programming languages by type   Lists of programming languages   List of programming languages for artificial intelligence   List of audio programming languages   List of BASIC dialects   List of C-family programming languages   List of Chinese programming languages   List of CLI languages   List of concurrent and parallel programming languages   List of constraint programming languages   List of educational programming languages   Generational list of programming languages   List of JVM languages   List of Lisp-family programming languages   List of programming languages with algebraic data types   Non-English-based programming languages   List of object-oriented programming languages   Comparison of open-source programming language licensing   List of reflective programming languages and platforms   Timeline of programming languages   Unisys MCP programming languages

• Comparison of basic instructions of programming languages
• Comparison of programming languages (syntax)
• Comparison of programming paradigms
• Comparison of multi-paradigm programming languages
• Measuring programming language popularity
• TIOBE index

References

1. As of May 2006 Diarmuid Pigott's Encyclopedia of Computer Languages hosted at Murdoch University, Australia lists 8512 computer languages.
2. Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, 3.9 Tagged Types and Type Extensions
3. Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 6: Subprograms
4. Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 12: Generic Units
5. Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 9: Tasks and Synchronization
6. Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3 Annex E: Distributed Systems
7. Vak.ru
8. ISO 1538:1984
9. Vak.ru
10. JSR 274
11. bell-labs.com
12. ANSI C89, ISO/IEC 9899:1990, 1999, 2011
13. ISO/IEC 14882:1998, 2003, 2011
14. Codeproject.com: Functional Programming in C# 3.0 using Lambda Expression
15. ECMA-334; ISO/IEC 23270:2006
16. Softvelocity.com
17. https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal#why
18. https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal#status
19. Basic Eiffel language mechanisms
20. Closure (computer programming)
21. ECMA-367; ISO/IEC 25436:2006
22. JSR 241
23. "The Haskell 2010 Language Report". Retrieved 2011-12-07. Most Haskell implementations extend the Haskell 2010 standard.
24. "M8 is out!". As a first peek into the future reflective capabilities of Kotlin, you can now access properties as first-class objects in Kotlin
25. Lua doesn't have explicit "object" type (more general type of "table" is used for object definition), but does have explicit syntax for object method calling
26. Version releases are accompanied with a definitive Lua Reference Manual showing full syntax and semantics; a reference implementation, and a test suite. These are used to generate other Lua VM implementations and compilers such as Kahlua and LLVM-Lua.
27. ISO/IEC 10514-1:1996
28. ISO 7185
29. PHP Manual, Chapter 19. Classes and Objects (PHP 5),
30. PHP Manual, Chapter 17. Functions
31. Rust FAQ, How do I map object-oriented concepts to Rust?
32. SMLNJ.org
33. Scala runs on the Java Virtual Machine from which it inherits the runtime exception handling.
34. Data from Code Complete, p. 100. The Statements ratio column "shows typical ratios of source statements in several high-level languages to the equivalent code in C. A higher ratio means that each line of code in the language listed accomplishes more than does each line of code in C.
35. The ratio of line count tests won by each language to the number won by C when using the Compare to feature at benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org. Last updated May, 2006. C gcc was used for C, C++ g++ was used for C++, FORTRAN G95 was used for FORTRAN, Java JDK Server was used for Java, and Smalltalk GST was used for Smalltalk.
36. Felleisen, Matthias. On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages. ESOP '90 3rd European Symposium on Programming. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.51.4656.
37. http://dare.ubvu.vu.nl/bitstream/1871/2609/1/11054.pdf

Further reading

• Cezzar, Ruknet. A Guide to Programming Languages: Overview and Comparison. ISBN 978-0-89006-812-0.

External links

• Comparison of programming languages at DMOZ
• 99-bottles-of-beer.net — one program in over a thousand variations and multiple languages.
• The speed, size and dependability of programming languages — charts and narrative based on The Computer Language Benchmarks Game data.
• Which programs are fast? The Computer Language Benchmarks Game website language comparisons
• Comparison of syntaxes with sample codes.
• Syntax Across Languages
• Rosetta Code — a programming language comparison wiki
• A Large Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in Github (2014)