Talk:Programming language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 18:28, 2 March 2025

Latest revision as of 11:28, 17 August 2025

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'''Programming Languages Are Compiled'''- many people will use compilation as a standard for whether or not something is a "real" programming language, usually arguing that an interpreter makes it a "scripting" language. This definition does not to do a good job describing virtual-machine based language implementations

'''Programming Languages Must be Turing Complete''' - the reason people think this is obvious, but an important misconception is that this test is meant more generally for instruction/mathematical operation sets, and predatesis just able to be applied to programming languages byas a long timeresult. Like much of Turing's work, it was just so solid that we can continue to use it for things he never even got to see, and programming languages inherently overlap with instructional sets by design - but at the end of the day Turing Completeness just means being able to accomplish the same things as a certain class of machine he made up (not to diminish the concept, it's a really important machine that does a lot).

'''Programming Languages must be imperative/have logic/control structures''' - this perception often arises due to the popularity and power of imperative programming languages - however as the name suggests (and this article even mentions several times), that's formally a *subset* of programming languages. Declarative programming often "feels" less like programming because it is not as concerned with how the task is going to be accomplished, but the original distinction of instructing a machine with language was not concerned with that sort of distinction.

I'm open to any feedback/discussion on this - I'm relatively new to editing here, but this is my field and I am happy to elaborate on or support anything that seems subjective/biased (or just own if its a bias ). I really think this would both represent these viewpoints more clearly, and contextualize why people might have differing ones "in the wild" [[User:Theaceofthespade|Theaceofthespade]] ([[User talk:Theaceofthespade|talk]]) 18:28, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

== A programming language is for writing programs ==

WRT "A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs."

Natural language is writing books. ...And a whole lot of other stuff.

Also, it's not just about writing. I could ''generate'' and that's not what I'd call writing. So, maybe 'authoring' is better word.

Thing is, it's not wrong but it's not accurate and it's grandiose. I can use a programming language to write a fragment or code that's never compiled into a program or compiled into a library. A language defines the rules for writing source code. Maybe less sexy, but that's all it is. If you love the 'notation' word, then: a programming language is notational system for encoding the control of a computer. [[User:Stevebroshar|Stevebroshar]] ([[User talk:Stevebroshar|talk]]) 02:12, 9 July 2025 (UTC)

== An implementation of a programming language ==

WRT "An implementation of a programming language is required in order to execute programs"

A compiler/interpreter is not an 'implementation' of a language. A compiler/interpreter understands and conforms to a language. [[User:Stevebroshar|Stevebroshar]] ([[User talk:Stevebroshar|talk]]) 02:18, 9 July 2025 (UTC)