Which language is most powerful

Question

Has there been studies on the most powerful language?

Answer 1

It depends on what you view of powerful is.

You can do almost anything you want in assembly code, so thats what I'd say the most powerful language is.

Above that is probably C.

Answer 2

There are two sorts of "power" in terms of a programming language - the span of the language's ability to perform processes, and the relative simplicity with with the language can implement complex processes.

By definition, a language will never be able to perform processes which the language it is compiled into cannot. For example, Python is usually implemented by the C program CPython, anything which can be done in Python must also be able to be done in C. Given this, the most "powerful" language in this sense would be machine code; though it is rarely used, so perhaps the best practical answer is assembly code.

but the whole purpose of higher-level languages is too make the syntax of the written code easier to understand and manipulate. This simplicity isn't just a matter of convenience - we humans (even programmer) have limited memory capacity and brainpower. Simpler languages allow us to design code which we might otherwise be unable to wrap our heads around. In this sense, the answer would be one of the more high-level languages such as Python. However, many language achieve this degree of simplicity by focusing on a specialized range of programming applications, for example MATLAB on mathematical programming.

It's hard, if not impossible, to quantify a given language's "power" in either sense, and I not aware of any studies that focus on this topic as a whole. When starting a project, a language should be chosen by the balance it presents between the two types of power, taking into account your own level of proficiency in that language.