what kinda programming languages are there??

rw120555

Golden Member
Jun 13, 2001
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I started programming in Basic 20+ years ago. I still occasionally use the Dos Qbasic (not sure if it comes bundled with Windows anymore or if I just have it from old installs) and I now occasionally use Visual Basic. I imagine the real programmers use things like C now, although I believe visual basic is still pretty popular.

Depending on what you want to do, you may find the built-in languages in Word and Excel and other programs are adequate for your tasks.
 

lucidguy

Banned
Apr 24, 2001
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There are two kinds of programming languages. Procedural and object-oriented.

Procedural languages are old and represent an ancient way of thinking. You have to tell the computer what to do at each step of the way. Encapsulation is very limited if at all present. Some examples are BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, etc. Assemblers for various machine architectures are also strictly procedural.

Object oriented languages allow you to encapsulate and reference collections of data and functions. This enables code reuse and makes possible collaboration among a large number of programmers. Collaborating on procedural languages is difficult to impossible. Some examples for object oriented languages are C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby.

Some object oriented languages are unfairly known as "scripting languages" due to their extensive use on things like string processing rather than multimedia features. Perl, Python, Ruby, etc, are often referred to as scripting rather than programming languages. But this is an arbitrary naming convention.
 

BFG10K

Lifer
Aug 14, 2000
22,709
2,998
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C used to be the most popular language but now C++ has taken over. If you're going to learn any language, learn C++.

Java and Visual BASIC are pretty popular as well.