What does “powerful” mean, when discussing programming languages?

Question

In the context of programming language discussion/comparison, what does the term \"power\" mean?

Does it have a well defined meaning? Even a poorly defined meaning?

Answer 1

Typically there are two distinct meanings:

• Expressive, meaning the code tends to be very short and understandable
• Low level, meaning you have very fine-grained control over the hardware.

For the most languages, these two definitions are at opposite ends of the spectrum: Python is very expressive but not very low level; C is very low level but not very expressive. Depending on which definition you pick, either language is powerful or not powerful.