1.3. The sources of Clojure’s power

Computers understand only one language, binary code. All other programming languages, including assembly (symbolic representation of the computer’s instruction set), are at a higher level than native machine code. The reason these other languages exist is so that programmers don’t have to deal with cryptic sequences of ones and zeroes. High-level languages increase the programmer’s productivity.

Programming languages vary greatly in expressiveness. Low-level languages, such as assembly language and the C programming language, are useful for certain tasks, such as writing operating systems and device drivers. For most other programming tasks, software engineers favor high-level languages, such as C++, Java, Ruby, or Python. Each programming language has a different philosophy, for instance, static or dynamic, strongly or weakly typed. It’s these differences in design that result in different levels of programmer productivity.