I have asked a legit question and yet it gets closed. why?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1480149/what-is-the-highest-level-programming-language-closed
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3 Answers
The problem with the question "What is the highest level programming language?" is very simple: by what standard do you measure the "height" of a programming language? What is higher level, C# or Java or Python or Perl or Ruby or Scheme or Lisp or Prolog or... I could go on, but you get the idea.
Basically, people colloquially say that there are "low-level" and "high-level" languages, and the low-level ones give you more direct access to the underlying hardware while the high-level ones abstract you away from it. How do you measure the level of abstraction?
How about C++? It lets you get as close to the metal as C, but gives you gazillions of features to the point where writing idiomatic C++ is nothing remotely like C. So is it really a low-level language if it's not commonly used as a low level language?
The point is that your question has no answer, a) because there is no scale by which to measure how high-level a language is, and b) because higher and higher level languages will continue to be invented, and there is no foreseeable limit to the potential amount of abstraction (seriously - the trend these days is to abstract away our loops with map() and stuff).
answered Sep 27, 2009 at 8:41
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Seems that many questions are vague on SO and only select ones get closed. That was the point of the question, I didn't want it to be specific to a certain area of programming, because it wanted to see if there were any that existed that were not domain specific. If this question was left open someone may have answered it and everyone could have learned something new.– Luke101Commented Sep 27, 2009 at 19:46
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In fact, your question was sensibly answered within the context you posed, so I don't know why are you complaining. If you wanted to know something else, you should contextualize and phrase your questions better. Commented Sep 27, 2009 at 20:18
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@unknown - This is true. The people with the rights to vote to close questions often disagree on whether or not a question should be closed. Some questions get closed and reopened and closed and reopened many times. The fact that yours is closed, and has no votes to reopen, shows that there's a pretty clear agreement that it's "not a real question". Commented Sep 27, 2009 at 21:11
As the comments show, your question is too vague.
You should, to start, define better what a "full application" is.
It would be helpful to tell where does this come from, is it you want to know about new high level languages? is it because you want to do a specific application (there might be langauges suited to the task at hand)?
answered Sep 27, 2009 at 8:14
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This was my intension. I wanted to see if there were any languages out there that were very high level and was not domain specific.– Luke101Commented Sep 27, 2009 at 19:47
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4You didn't convey your intention well... you used an awful title (the title poses an unanswerable question), provided little to no context and didn't even define well the parameters in which to answer. Commented Sep 27, 2009 at 20:16
My criterion for "not a real question" is whether I could recognize something as being an answer. This doesn't qualify as a real question.
Not only is it appallingly vague, but it confuses objectivity and subjectivity in a bad way. There is no well-accepted definition of how high-level a programming language is, so the evaluation has to be subjective. On the other hand, the "highest-level" implies that there is an objective answer.
I'd be fine with a CW-style poll for what people think is a very-high-level language (although these are getting much less popular with the 3K+ crowd). Or a question on what makes a programming language high-level. Or if the Q offered a definition of language level height. Anything where I could recognize an answer.
answered Sep 28, 2009 at 14:07
