BASIC vs. Fortran vs. Haskell vs. JavaScript Comparison Chart

BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. Initially, BASIC concentrated on supporting straightforward mathematical work, with matrix arithmetic support from its initial implementation as a batch language, and character string functionality being added by 1965. The emergence of BASIC took place as part of a wider movement towards time-sharing systems. Some dialects of BASIC supported matrices and matrix operations, which can be used to solve sets of simultaneous linear algebraic equations. These dialects would directly support matrix operations such as assignment, addition, multiplication (of compatible matrix types), and evaluation of a determinant. BASIC declined in popularity in the 1990s, as more powerful microcomputers came to market and programming languages with advanced features (such as Pascal and C) became tenable on such computers.

Every expression in Haskell has a type that is determined at compile time. All the types composed together by function application have to match up. If they don't, the program will be rejected by the compiler. Types become not only a form of guarantee, but a language for expressing the construction of programs. Every function in Haskell is a function in the mathematical sense (i.e., "pure"). Even side-effecting IO operations are but a description of what to do, produced by pure code. There are no statements or instructions, only expressions that cannot mutate variables (local or global) nor access state like time or random numbers. You don't have to explicitly write out every type in a Haskell program. Types will be inferred by unifying every type bidirectionally. However, you can write out types if you choose, or ask the compiler to write them for you for handy documentation.