An overview of programming languages ST-LE-2026-11

by Prof. Christoph Lüth (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz)

Thursday Apr 16, 2026, 10:00 AM → 12:00 PM Europe/Berlin

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Motivation 

Programming is the essential tool for managing data sets and conducting data science methods. Handling huge data sets manually is impossible, so we can only prepare, curate, analyze and evaluate them by programmable means. In addition, programming is crucial for documenting, creating graphical output, and presenting results (e.g., on the web). In order to write programs, we need to a programming language – but what is that?

Learning contents 

• What is a programming language, actually?
• What characterizes a programming language and what is it for?
• Why is HTML not a programming language and what has Turing to do with it?

 

Approximately 700 programming languages exist – so how can we keep an overview? We learn to distinguish languages from their degree of abstraction and programming paradigm (imperative, procedural, object-oriented, functional, logical, …), or their area of application. Further, we talk about how to choose the appropriate language for the task at hand, which programming languages you should know, and see some of them briefly presented in this course.

Learning objectives 

Overview about programming languages, their features, significance and criteria for distinction.

Prior knowledge

While advanced programming skills are not required to attend the lecture, Prof. Lüth has included some small programming exercises where a laptop with a programming environment would be helpful.

If you do not have any programming environment (e.g. Python, R, Rstudio, etc.) installed on your computer, you can use web-based options:  For example, participants with access to the Uni Bremen ZfN Services can use the Uni Bremen JupyterHub. Alternatively, participants from Germany can use the NFDI JupyterHub. 

Further reading

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