by Shawn Schafer

Created on: December 30, 2009

Knowing the limits of a programming language is an important thing. There are many limiting factors of different programming languages,  just some of which include the following: Platform Portability, Compile Time Overhead, Runtime Overhead, Readability, Ease to Learn, Popularity, Flexibility. Keywords, and Documentation. Some of these tend to overlap. I beleive it would be useful to break the issue down into these mentioned assets of programming language limitations.

Platform Portability- Platform Portability is how well the code of a particular language will work from one platform to another. The three main platforms are Windows, Mac, and Linux. Possibly the best language as far as platform portability goes is Java. Java is a virtual language. What this means is that what the programmer sees is translated into a code that the compiler can read, and then that code is translated into something the machine can read. What this means is that; usually, the same exact Java executable that works on Windows will work on Mac or Linux. The exception is if the code has system calls, although even this can be worked around with a little simple logic.

C++ is slightly less portable. While the same source code will usually work unmodified from one platform to another if it is a simple console application; this is usually not the case with a graphical user interface application, also known as a GUI app. Also, even for console apps, the code will have to be compiled separately for each platform. This is because C++ is a language whose compilers translate code directly to machine language. Also, C++ has no built in GUI handling(like Java does), so each platform has its own libraries(parts of code to be used for a specific function) to handle GUI's.

The worst for platform portability is probably C#. This is only because of a lack of support, but for right now it is nearly impossible to program anything in C# for the Linux platform.

Compile Time Overhead- Different languages take different amounts of time to translate from the code the programmer writes into machine language. Languages like Assembly take very little time to compile because they are very close to the machine language. Object Oriented Languages(OOL's) take more time to compile because they are further away from being like the machine language. In addition, OOL's often have multiple files. This can sometimes increase compile time.

Runtime Overhead- This is similar to compile time overhead, but a little

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