what would be the disavantages of writing all applications using the same programming language?

Answer 1

The short answer is that different programming languages are better at doing different things.

There are dozens of programming languages out there and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Choosing the right language can help improve the software's performance, portability, ease of maintenance, etc.

Here's some examples of programming languages:

Assembly: Building the sandcastle one grain at a time. Extreme level of control over the processor and hardware. Low level language. Tedious. Can be extremely optimized for performance sensitive programs. Must be rewritten if ported to a new processor.

C/C++: Powerful, flexible, extensible. Good all-around programming language. Widely used. Portable. Useful for handling data and objects in a logical manner.

Perl: Weakly typed language. Does not have to be compiled. Great for handling and parsing text. Performance may be slower than comparable programs in other languages.

PHP: Scripting language specifically designed for creating dynamic web pages. Built-in functions to support dynamic content. Easy to learn and use.

There are many many other languages that I could not include in this list ("What?! You didn't include Python/Java/FORTRAN/Ruby etc?!") but I think it illustrates the point that if a single programming language was used for all applications, some programs would be difficult or even impossible to make.

Answer 2

As others have listed, the disadvantage is that some languages, you will have to work a little harder to do things in one that are a cinch in another. I had such a bad experience parsing in C++ but with Visual Basic it was so ridiculously easy.

There is a also a tradeoff between speed and stability. Higher languages protect the programmer and the computer from your programming mistakes, but that comes at a price of slower execution. And as much as I hate bloatware, I'd rather use a program that dies gracefully than goes haywire.

That said, you can certainly program everything using one language and no one will really care, unless for some reason your program runs like molasses even on the boss' hot new Intel CPU. Then I would blame the programmer not the language.

Answer 3

And, to follow up on what has already been posted, if you had a single language that was capable of good performance in all platforms, the complexity of that language would be a couple of magnitudes greater than C or C++, and a magnitude greater than that compared to something such as COBOL. In other words, yes, you could do that, but it defeats the purpose of languages in the first place. That purpose being to provide a reasonable compromise between native spoken human language and binary machine language by an intermediate layer of abstraction. Such a large language construct would necessarily be more confusing and more like all the disadvantages of English without any machine language advantage either. Neither the human users or the computer will "benefit".

Answer 4

Some languages are better suited for certain tasks than other languages. For example, if you need to parse text files, it is much easier to do this with Perl than with C++. If you have a process intensive task that needs to perform it's operations quickly, C++ is better than Perl.

Answer 5

As a developer, i think of a super benefit in making use of the comparable language in all purposes is they are able to all work together with one yet another. working example, you are able to write a shopper administration application in VB and function it work together with an accounting application additionally written in VB, perhaps with the aid of yet another programmer.