Programming Language Concepts
Field Cady · 2017
This chapter focuses on some of the more abstract, theoretical aspects of programming languages. In imperative programming, programmer's code is mostly a sequence of instructions for the computer to follow. Functional programming is largely inspired by the desire to avoid “side effects”. Functional programming lends itself well to data science, especially while doing some kind of batch processing. An object-oriented language will package data and the logic that handles the data into user-friendly black boxes called “objects”. Hardcore object-oriented code consists almost entirely of defining class and their member functions and makes liberal use of class inheritance and other fancy features. Besides the programming paradigm(s) that it implements, a language is also characterized by its “type system”. “Compiled languages” and “interpreted languages” used to have very clear-cut meanings. Traditionally, a compiler is a special-purpose program that translates human readable code into “machine code”, which just operates on raw bytes and is directly executed by the microprocessor.