What do Programming Langauges actually do?

Programming langauages irrespective of what language, helps you get things done on a computer. Whether its a simple addition or a heavy computation or storing data or playing music, all languages are getting things done.

So why are there so many languages?

Irrespective of the language we use, all languages ultimately run on hardware. To run on hardware, all languages should convert their code into 1s and 0s (binary code) as the hardware only understands that. Humans communicate in their native languages. So it is not easy for humans to write programs in binary code. That’s why developers started writing computer languages that helps them bridge this gap between hardware and software. All the programming langauges stand in between these two ends, human communication language binary code. Depending on where it stands, the langauge may be called low level or high level.

Abstraction

Syntax

Data Types

Variables and Memory Management

Control Structures

Functions/Methods

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)

Libraries and APIs

Error Handling and Debugging

Concurrency - Parallelism

IO - Hardware Access

Async -

How to select a programming language, what factors to look at?

Project Requirements Developer Familiarity Community Support
Available libraries