“Every language was created for a specific purpose”

Question

I was reading the post Why Language is Important (Why I prefer C#) from \'Dot Net Thoughts\' and the first paragraph of the article ends with this statement:

Answer 1

Perl - The glue language for system administrators which has now grown to a general purpose programming language.

Answer 2

I have to take this opportunity to mention to Piet, whose only design principle is: Program code will be in the form of abstract art. And yes, it's a real language, in the sense that there are interpreters for it, and a few working programs. Here's one that generates prime numbers:

_{(source: dangermouse.net)}

I once spent probably half an hour or so trying to draw a dinky little program that could determine if a number was even or odd.

Answer 3

PHP Originally stood for "Personal Home Pages" which says it all I think.

APL Stands for "A Programming Language" and was created for "teaching and analysis of topics related to the application of computers"

TCL Pronounced "Tickle" was "born out of frustration" by John Ousterhout and was meant to be embedded in other applications

Applescript Was a progression from Hypertalk for Appels HyperCard application and was, like TCL, designed to be embedded in other applications to facilitate scripting.

That's all. My Programming Language history isn't great.

Answer 4

I think JAVA is the only language that was advertised with its purpose:

write once, run anywhere

Answer 5

Ada - Designed by the Department of Defense for safety-critical embedded/real-time systems.

Answer 6

I think it's better stated to say that, "every language is best-suited for a specific purpose." Not every language was created with specific purpose, but there are usually a handful of domains in which it excels.

For example, "Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way." C and C++ are more common general purpose languages.

And now for a list of languages and what they're actually used for instead of just what people think about them:

PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python: Web apps (Haskell is starting to be considered here too [thanks Reddit])

Javascript: AJAX, DOM manipulation

BASIC, VB: Rapid prototyping, teaching

AWK: Text processing

C & co.: System (OS's, etc), application software, device drivers, embedded systems, server/client applications, etc/

Objective C: iPhone

Lisp, Prolog: AI

Erlang: Multi-threaded, parallel, fault-tolerant programming.

Scala, Haskell: Couldn't find any one clear thing, they both seem pretty general (I use neither).

Pascal: Teaching

Eiffel: Finance, aerospace, health, games and teaching (apparently).

R: Statistical computing and graphics.