CHARACTERISTICS OF A GOOD PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

 Several characteristics are important for making a programming language good are:

1.    Simplicity: A good programming language must be simple, easy to learn and use. It should provide a programmer with a clear, simple and unified set of concepts that can be grasped easily.

2.    Naturalness: A good language should be natural for the application area for which it is designed. It should provide appropriate operators, data structures, control structures and natural syntax to facilitate programmers to code their problems easily and efficiently. FORTRAN and COBOL are good examples of languages possessing high degree of naturalness in scientific and business application areas respectively.

3.    Abstraction: Abstraction means the ability to define and then use complicated structures in ways that allow many of the details to be ignored. The degree of abstraction allowed by a programming language directly affects its ease of programming. For example object oriented languages support high degree of abstraction.  Hence, writing programs in object oriented languages is much is easier.

4.    Efficiency: Programs written in good programming language are translated into machine code efficiently, are executed efficiently and acquire relative less space in memory.

5.    Structured Programming Support: A good programming language should have necessary features to allow programmers to write their programs based on the concepts of structured programming. 

6.    Compactness: In good programming language, programmer should be able to express the intended operations concisely without losing readability. Programmers generally do not like diverse language because they need to write too much.

7.    Locality: A good programming language should be such that while writing a program, a programmer need not jump around visually as the text of the program is prepared.

8.    Extensibility:  A good programming language should also allow extension through simple, natural and elegant mechanism.  Almost all language provide subprogram definition mechanism for this purpose but some languages are weak in this aspect.

9.    Suitability to its Environment: Depending upon the type of application for which programming language has been designed, the language must also be made suitable to its environment. 

 

Selecting a Language for Coding an Application:

Often one has to select a programming language out of the many options available for coding an application. The following factors generally influence the selection process:

1.    Nature of application: The language should be suitable for the application area. For example, FORTRAN is suitable for scientific and engineering applications while COBOL is suitable for business applications.

2.    Familiarity with the language:  If there are multiple languages found suitable for the application area the language selected should be one that is best known to the programmers who are going to code the application.

3.    Ease of learning the language:  If there are multiple languages found suitable for the application area, and if the programmers are not familiar with any of them the language that is easier to learn and use should be selected.

4.    Availability of program development tools: The time and effort needed before selecting a language, one must also find out whether the language is well supported with good program development tools like compiler, interpreter, debugger, linker, etc. The time and effort needed for coding an application can be reduced drastically; if the selected language is supported with good program development tools.

5.    Execution efficiency: If the execution efficiency of an application is important, one can use an assembly language instead of high level language for coding the application. 

6.    Features of a good programming language discussed in the above section often influence the selection process.