Do high-level programming languages tend to be object-oriented while low-level languages are procedurally oriented?

Question

I'm just getting a bit confused about all the language types out there. What's the difference - if there is one - between the high level / low level languages distinction compared to the object-oriented / procedural distinction? A lot of the analogies seem similar.

Answer 1

The high/low level distinction is more about abstraction than paradigm. Typically, the "lower" you are, the more you have to know about the machine you're running on - its memory, file system, and even processor instruction set.

A high-level language puts a layer of abstraction between you and the machine. It handles the gory details. This is both good and bad. Abstraction takes away some worry but also takes away control.

A high-level language can be procedural, object oriented, functional, etc...

Lower-level languages may not provide concepts like object orientation, because object orientation is an abstraction.

Answer 2

There isn't necessarily any causation across these two axes ("paradigm" and "level"), but I think the correlation is that logic and functional languages tend to be highest level, followed shortly by object-oriented languages, with procedural languages typically lower-level.

And not part of the question, but I also think that correlationally, dynamically-typed languages tend to be higher-level than statically-typed ones.

I think it might be an interesting visualization for someone to do a three-dimensional scatter plot of programming languages across the three axes: paradigm (logic/functional/oo/procedural) typing (static/dynamic) and level (see e.g. 'Code Complete' for various metrics on measuring level) .

Answer 3

High level/low level refers to the perceived 'closeness' of the language to assembler and machine code (assembler is low-level, C is seen as lower level than C++ or Java, etc).

OO and procedural programming are language facilities provided to support a certain way of designing programs (called programming paradigms). They have nothing to do with if the language is high or low level beyond the fact that an OO language tends to not be low level as assembler doesn't know about objects and classes. There are a lot of other paradigms out there as well, such as functional programming.

Answer 4

"High level" and "low level" are somewhat vague terms that people can disagree about. You can take a look at the amount of abstraction a programming language provides by how much code you have to write to accomplish a particular task, then call the languages which need less code higher level. Of course, then you need a way to measure code size.

Answer 5

I like to say that - it all boils down to the machine instruction set. So, regardless of how high-level something is represented, it will still boil down to the machine instructions. So, high-level languages are abstractions of ideas, while low-level ones twiddle closer to the hardware.

The analogies are similar because it all boils down to one thing - machine code!