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Is there an objective way to measure the flexibility and expressiveness of programming languages?

• lutusp 14y ago
  No, not "objective", because languages fill different roles, and it is the language's role that determines its "flexibility and expressiveness" for that specific purpose. This means comparisons cannot be based on shared criteria.
  • MrBra 14y ago
    Excuse me, what do you think it is the role of a programming language usually ?
• MrBra 14y ago
  Is there a way to measure the flexibility and expressiveness of a language?
  • elbear 14y ago
    You tell me. You're the one saying that some languages are more flexible and expressive than others. How do you measure that?
    • MrBra 14y ago
      How do you measure wheter what you just typed is more expressive to me than raw ascii numbers representing the characters you typed? ... Why do you need to make a small problem big, just to sound "academic" ? ..you can easily measure the expressiveness of any given language by how easily you can understand it based on what you already know (i.e. your mothertongue language). The same old principle of the least surpise.. And flexibility ? How would you tell if one language is more flexible than another ? It takes no academic graduation to understand that flexibilty is the degree of freedom the language allows you in combining the language fundamental "bits" in syntactically correct ways. So, getting back on topic for you to understand better... : Ruby different Ways To Loop http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/151837 http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/151837 The beauty of Ruby through examples http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/217762 http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/217762 Good reading.