Visual Guide to Programming Language Properties
–
Chinese translation
Here’s an interactive chart showing high-level properties of various programming languages.
You can filter the chart to only show the properties that your favorite language supports.
Interesting observations:
- Some properties enable (but do not always imply) other properties, as shown by arrows.
- Properties result in both benefits and detriments to a language, as shown by arrows.
- Sometimes it is necessary for multiple properties to be present for a particular benefit to manifest, as shown by arrows interrupted by a vertical bar.
Type System
† “Programming with collections” is discussed in Lisp vs. Pascal Design Philosophies.
Resource Management
§ See also the idea of monadic regions for block-scoped resource management.
¶ Objective-C is the only known language that supports automatic reference counting.
Domain Specific Language Support
‡ Beyond the Lisp family, Prolog is the only other language I know of that is homoiconic.
Its syntax is reasonably easy to read, unlike Lisp.
Tools
| C++ | ObjC | Java | Haskell | Python | Ruby | Lisp | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Code coverage | - | - | EMMA | hpc | coverage.py | SimpleCov | varies |
| Unit test automation | - | - | JUnit | HUnit | unittest | many | varies |
| Package manager | - | - | - | Cabal | pip | gem | varies |
| Environment isolater | - | - | - | cabal-dev, hsenv | virtualenv | rvm | varies |
Related Articles
- Spectrum of Languages by Hardware Distance
- Visualizes programming languages by their distance from the hardware.
- Unique Features of Various Programming Languages
- Discusses several programming languages and their unique features.
- Describes some properties mentioned in this article in more detail.
Series
This article is part of the Programming for Perfectionists series.
Please send comments and corrections to David Foster.
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