What does "powerful" mean, when discussing programming languages?

Posted by Andrew Russell on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Andrew Russell
Published on 2010-06-12T05:23:34Z Indexed on 2010/06/12 5:32 UTC
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subjective

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language

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pedantic

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unanswerable

In the context of programming language discussion/comparison, what does the term "power" mean?

Does it have a well defined meaning? Even a poorly defined meaning?

Say if someone says "language X is more powerful than language Y" or asks the same as a question, what do they mean - or what information are they trying to find out?

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