Ranking of Programming Languages from High to Low Level

David Lee
6 min readFeb 9, 2024

In this slightly subjective article — emphasis on the “slightly” — we’re considering C as our baseline for low-level goodness. Because let’s face it, anything lower than C and we’d be diving into the murky depths of assembly language, and who wants to go there? Certainly not me!

So, without further ado, let’s dive into my not-so-humble opinions on the matter. Strap in, folks!

High-Level Languages:

  1. Python
  2. JavaScript
  3. Ruby
  4. PHP
  5. Java
  6. C#

Mid to High-Level Languages:

  1. Go
  2. Scala
  3. Erlang
  4. Clojure
  5. Haskell

Mid-Level Languages:

  1. Rust
  2. C++
  3. OCaml
  4. Scheme

Low-Level Languages:

  1. Zig
  2. C
  3. Assembly
  4. Machine Code

Python

Python — the friendly neighborhood language that’s as close to speaking English as you can get in the coding world. It’s like…

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David Lee

Gopher and Rustacean -- > ⾶ 🤺 I use VIM btw 🤫