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1. Introduction

There are many different programming languages available. It is useful to be able to group programming languages, so that they can be discussed and compared.

A common way of grouping programming languages is by their general approach to solving problems. These approaches, or 'paradigms', are often specialised. They focus on being better at a particular aspect of programming, at the expense of other aspects. Often there are many different programming languages that share the same paradigm.

You need to know the main paradigms of programming languages and why you would use one over another.

The main types (paradigms) of programming languages are

  • Low level languages,
  • Object-orientated languages
  • Declarative languages
  • Procedural languages
  • Functional languages.

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