Programming languages can be grouped by the number and types of paradigms supported.

Paradigm summaries

A concise reference for the programming paradigms listed in this article.

Concurrent programming – have language constructs for concurrency, these may involve multi-threading, support for distributed computing, message passing, shared resources (including shared memory), or futures

• Actor programming – concurrent computation with actors that make local decisions in response to the environment (capable of selfish or competitive behaviour)

• Constraint programming – relations between variables are expressed as constraints (or constraint networks), directing allowable solutions (uses constraint satisfaction or simplex algorithm)

• Dataflow programming – forced recalculation of formulas when data values change (e.g. spreadsheets)

• Declarative programming – describes what computation should perform, without specifying detailed state changes cf. imperative programming (functional and logic programming are major subgroups of declarative programming)

• Distributed programming – have support for multiple autonomous computers that communicate via computer networks

• Functional programming – uses evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data

• Generic programming – uses algorithms written in terms of to-be-specified-later types that are then instantiated as needed for specific types provided as parameters

• Imperative programming – explicit statements that change a program state

• Logic programming – uses explicit mathematical logic for programming

Metaprogramming – writing programs that write or manipulate other programs (or themselves) as their data, or that do part of the work at compile time that would otherwise be done at runtime

• Template metaprogramming – metaprogramming methods in which a compiler uses templates to generate temporary source code, which is merged by the compiler with the rest of the source code and then compiled

• Reflective programming – metaprogramming methods in which a program modifies or extends itself

Object-oriented programming – uses data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions (objects) to design programs

• Class-based – object-oriented programming in which inheritance is achieved by defining classes of objects, versus the objects themselves

• Prototype-based – object-oriented programming that avoids classes and implements inheritance via cloning of instances

• Pipeline programming – a simple syntax change to add syntax to nest function calls to language originally designed with none

• Rule-based programming – a network of rules of thumb that comprise a knowledge base and can be used for expert systems and problem deduction & resolution

• Visual programming – manipulating program elements graphically rather than by specifying them textually (e.g. Simulink); also termed diagrammatic programming

Language overview

See also

• Carbon (programming language) — multi-paradigm language being developed at Google to be a successor to C++

• Programming paradigm

• List of programming languages by type

• Domain-specific language

• Domain-specific multimodeling

Notes

Citations

References

• Jim Coplien, Multiparadigm Design for C++, Addison-Wesley Professional, 1998.