Help me sort programing languages a bit

Posted by b-gen-jack-o-neill on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by b-gen-jack-o-neill
Published on 2010-06-11T09:26:03Z Indexed on 2010/06/11 9:32 UTC
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Hi, so I asked here few days ago about C# and its principles. Now, if I may, I have some additional general questions about some languages, becouse for novice like me, it seems a bit confusing. To be exact I want to ask more about language functions capabilities than syntax and so.

To be honest, its just these special functions that bothers me and make me so confused. For exmaple, C has its printf(), Pascal has writeln() and so. I know in basic the output in assembler of these funtions would be similiar, every language has more or less its special functions. For console output, for file manipulation, etc. But all these functions are de-facto part of its OS API, so why is for example in C distinguished between C standard library functions and (on Windows) WinAPI functions when even printf() has to use some Windows feature, call some of its function to actually show desired text on console window, becouse the actuall "showing" is done by OS. Where is the line between language functions and system API?

Now languages I dont quite understand - Python, Ruby and similiar. To be more specific, I know they are similiar to java and C# in term they are compiled into bytecode. But, I do not unerstand what are its capabilities in term of building GUI applications. I saw tutorial for using Ruby to program GUI applications on Linux and Windows. But isn´t that just some kind of upgrade? I mean fram other tutorials It seemed like these languages was first intended for small scripts than building big applications.

I hope you understand why I am confused. If you do, please help me sort it out a bit, I have no one to ask.

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