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Questions tagged [programming-languages]

A programming language is an artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine. **Please note:** As is the case elsewhere on Stack Overflow, resource and tutorial recommendation requests, requests for lists of things ("which languages have this feature..."), and excessively opinion-based ("what's the best...") questions are off topic.

In the 1950s E. Dykstra stated that:

We can call something a programming language if it does three things: execute sequential statements, make decisions and allow looping or iteration.

A programming language is an artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer.

This tag is particularly suitable for questions about programming languages and programming language design in general.

A programming language is a notation for writing programs, which are specifications of a computation or algorithm.

A popular weblog dedicated to programming languages design is Lambda the Ultimate.

Programming language description wikipedia

For a discussion on the use of the tag see here.

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What is the difference between statically typed and dynamically typed languages?

I hear a lot that new programming languages are dynamically typed but what does it actually mean when we say a language is dynamically typed vs. statically typed?
Rachel
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Strangest language feature

What is, in your opinion, the most surprising, weird, strange or really "WTF" language feature you have encountered? Please only one feature per answer.
Thomas Bonini
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What's the name for hyphen-separated case?

This is PascalCase: SomeSymbol This is camelCase: someSymbol This is snake_case: some_symbol So my questions is whether there is a widely accepted name for this: some-symbol? It's commonly used in url's.
lms
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What is Haskell used for in the real world?

There is a lot of hype around Haskell, however, it is hard to get information on how it is used in the real world applications. What are the most popular projects / usages of Haskell and why it excels at solving these problems?
Sergio Tapia
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What is duck typing?

I came across the term duck typing while reading random topics on software online and did not completely understand it. What is “duck typing”?
sushil bharwani
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What are five things you hate about your favorite language?

There's been a cluster of Perl-hate on Stack Overflow lately, so I thought I'd bring my "Five things you hate about your favorite language" question to Stack Overflow. Take your favorite language and tell me five things you hate about it. Those…
brian d foy
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What is the meaning of the term "thread-safe"?

Does it mean that two threads can't change the underlying data simultaneously? Or does it mean that the given code segment will run with predictable results when multiple threads are executing that code segment?
Varun Mahajan
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Scripting Language vs Programming Language

Can anyone explain the difference between Scripting Language and Programming Language please? Also can you state some examples for each. I have Googled a lot but I always find the best answers from Stack Overflow.
Rahul Reddy
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What should every JavaScript programmer know?

Is there a set of things that every JavaScript programmer should know to be able to say "I know JavaScript"?
gath
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Why functional languages?

I see a lot of talk on here about functional languages and stuff. Why would you use one over a "traditional" language? What do they do better? What are they worse at? What's the ideal functional programming application?
MattBelanger
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What languages are Windows, Mac OS X and Linux written in?

I was just wondering who knows what programming languages Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are made up from and what languages are used for each part of the OS (ie: Kernel, plug-in architecture, GUI components, etc). I assume that there are multiple…
Brock Woolf
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Compiled vs. Interpreted Languages

I'm trying to get a better understanding of the difference. I've found a lot of explanations online, but they tend towards the abstract differences rather than the practical implications. Most of my programming experiences has been with CPython…
chimeracoder
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What is Type-safe?

What does "type-safe" mean?
Razin
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Function overloading by return type?

Why don't more mainstream statically typed languages support function/method overloading by return type? I can't think of any that do. It seems no less useful or reasonable than supporting overload by parameter type. How come it's so much less…
dsimcha
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Language Books/Tutorials for popular languages

It wasn't that long ago that I was a beginning coder, trying to find good books/tutorials on languages I wanted to learn. Even still, there are times I need to pick up a language relatively quickly for a new project I am working on. The point of…
Craig H
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