A comparison of paradigm-based programming languages: A quantitative approach and experimental results

Abstract

The subject of study in the article is the properties and differences of programming languages, the importance of properties for developers, the concept of a programming language paradigm, its quantitative value, and the calculation of the quantitative difference between languages. The purpose of the article is to develop a mathematical model of the distance between programming languages ​​based on the introduced concept of a programming language paradigm and its quantitative value, which is important in particular for the selection of languages ​​for diverse programming with properties that do not coincide as much as possible, creating a basis for future research on quantitative indicators of programming languages ​​depending on their properties. Tasks: to find out the importance of individual properties of programming languages ​​using expert survey, to introduce and substantiate the concept of a programming language paradigm as a tuple of properties ordered by importance for the application developer, to obtain an algorithm for unambiguously mapping programming language paradigms to a set of integers, to calculate the distance between programming languages ​​based on the introduced concept of a programming language paradigm and its quantitative value as the modulus of the difference in quantitative values ​​of the paradigm. The methods used are: expert survey, analysis of programming language specifications, set bijection. The results of the article: the concept of a programming language paradigm and its quantitative value was formed based on the importance of individual properties of languages ​​for the developer, which were clarified by means of an expert survey and the distance between languages ​​as the module of the difference between the quantitative value of the paradigms. Conclusions. The scientific novelty lies in clarifying the importance of individual properties of programming languages ​​for the application developer, formalizing the concept of the difference between programming languages, introducing and substantiating the concept of a programming language paradigm and its quantitative value, creating an algorithm for its calculation, creating a base for future research on the relationship between the quantitative value of the paradigm and the speed of programs written in a certain language, the laboriousness of translating the text of programs in different languages ​​from one to another.