Kinds of Computer Languages

• Imperative
• Specifies how a computation is to be done.
• Examples: C, C++, C#, Fortran, Java
• Declarative
• Specifies what computation is to be done.
• Examples: Haskell, ML, Prolog
• von Neumann
• One whose computational model is based on the von Neumann architecture.
• Basic means of computation is through the modification of variables (computing via side effects).
• Statements influence subsequent computations by changing the value of memory.
• Examples: C, C++, C#, Fortran, Java
• Object-oriented
• Program consists of interacting objects.
• Each object has its own internal state and executable functions (methods) to manage that state.
• Object-oriented programming is based on encapsulation, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance.
• Examples: C++, C#, Java, OCaml, Simula 67, Smalltalk

• Scripting
• An interpreted language with high-level operators for "gluing together" computations.
• Examples: AWK, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby
• Functional
• One whose computational model is based on the recursive definition of functions (lambda calculus).
• Examples: Haskell, Lisp, ML.
• Parallel
• One that allows a computation to run concurrently on multiple processors.
• Examples
• Libraries: POSIX threads, MPI
• Languages: Ada, Cilk, OpenCL, Chapel, X10
• Architecture: CUDA (parallel programming architecture for GPUs)
• Domain specific
• Many areas have special-purpose languages to facilitate the creation of applications.
• Examples
• YACC for creating parsers
• LEX for creating lexical analyzers
• MATLAB for numerical computations
• SQL for database applications
• Markup
• Not programming languages in the sense of being Turing complete, but widely used for document preparation.
• Examples: HTML, XHTML, XML