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

I think that, perhaps coincidentally, the physics definition of power is relevant here: "The rate at which work is performed."

Of course, a toaster does not perform very quickly the work of putting out fires. Similarly, the power of a programming language is not universal, but specific to the domain or task to which it is being applied. C is a powerful language for writing device drivers or implementations of higher-level languages; Python is a powerful language for writing general-purpose applications; XPath is a powerful language for writing queries on structured data sets.

So given a problem domain, the power of a language can be said to be the rate at which a competent programmer is able to use it to solve problems in that domain.