system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What is the difference between computer programming languages and what makes one "more powerful" than another?
gpt
Different languages exist either to attack different sorts of problems, or to implement different computer science paradigms. It is not very wise to say a language is more powerful than another, because this lacks context. Powerful at doing what?

For instance, Java has a couple of major claims to faith: it was one of the first popular Object-Oriented languages, and in this sense it was created to implement that particular paradigm. More importantly, though, Java is made to be portable. You can write something once, and it works equally on all operating systems with a Java implementation. It is very powerful in this sense, because it has huge penetration.

Take C and C++, on the other hand. They are harder to learn, code needs to be recompiled and sometimes rewritten and repackaged quite extensively to be able to run on different systems; but, it is extremely fast and allows you to manipulate the hardware in a very direct way, which Java doesn't. In this sense, it is more powerful than Java for applications that require extreme hardware integration and speed. Most Operating Systems themselves are written in C.