-- ''Geoffrey James'', The Tao of Programming 

  

 A human-readable language to control computers. SourceCode written in a ProgrammingLanguage may either be compiled into a [BinaryExecutable] or [ByteCode] by a [Compiler] or executed directly by means of an Interpreter. 

  

 !!! Very high level general purpose languages 

  

 These languages are highly abstract compared to how the machine actually executes them. Data types and data structures in these languages are often encapsulated in a large shell of metainformation that the programmer never gets (and indeed never needs) to see, managed by the language implementation on the fly behind the scenes to accomodate the code's needs. These languages are designed to make it easy for the programmer to express the problem at hand without much red tape. The complete opposite to systems programming languages, they're highly preferable for userland applications that do not require execution speed over everything. Code written in these languages often is or can be much easier to maintain than a comparable lower level language implementation, if only due to its reduced size. Especially very simple tasks tend to have ludicruously high ratios of low level language code size to high level language code size.