While you'll find dozens of ways to classify various programming languages, they generally fall into five major categories. Keep in mind that some languages may fall under more than one type:
A procedural language follows a sequence of statements or commands in order to achieve a desired output. Each series of steps is called a procedure, and a program written in one of these languages will have one or more procedures within it. Common examples of procedural languages include:
Rather than focusing on the execution of statements, functional languages focus on the output of mathematical functions and evaluations. Each function is a reusable module of code–performs a specific task and returns a result. The result will vary depending on what data you input into the function. Some popular functional programming languages include:
This type of language treats a program as a group of objects composed of data and program elements, known as attributes and methods. Objects can be reused within a program or in other programs. This makes it a popular language type for complex programs, as code is easier to reuse and scale. Some common object-oriented languages include: