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 view the term as marketing fluff, no one well-defined meaning.

If you consider, say, Assembler, C, and C++. On occasions one drops from C++ "down" to C for particualr needs, and in turn from C down to assembler. So that make assembler the most powerful because it's the only language that can do everything. Or, to argue the other way, a single line of C++ code can replace several of C (hiding polymorphic dispatch via function pointers for example) and a single line of C replaces many of assembler. So C++ is more powerful because one line does "more".

I think the term had some currency when products such as early databases and spreadsheets had in-built languages, some quite restricted. So vendors would tout their language as being "powerful" because it was less restricted.