Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Very high-level programming language (2nd nomination)

Very high-level programming language (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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Performing the second AfD step on behalf of a temporary account as requested at Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion § Proposed Deletion Very high-level programming language. I have no opinion on the actual proposal and won't watch this discussion.

Unpopular buzzword that never took off and has contradictory explanations, is a stub and only two citations. It's the same length as when it was added back in 2005. I don't know why the users thought it was important in 2007. Maybe it was briefly minimally popular back in the early 2000s. It hasn't been relevant in the 2010s or the 2020s. One of the users in the deletion discussion back then linked ProSet as an example which now links to an article about soccer. ~2026-41888-44 (talk) 23:06, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

FaviFake (talk) 23:24, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

Keep. The deletion rationale is illogical. The term was in use from the 1970s to the 2000s. The latest use I can find is An article from 2012. Notability is not temporary. Lack of edits over time is not a deletion rationale. There are books on the subject, so it doesn't sound like a meaningless buzzword.

Pro Set has been an article about American football since 2005. The author likely meant a 1990s programming language for data sets.

The article can be rewritten. SenshiSun (talk) 02:05, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

Okay. Tell me what a very high level language is? Is it a dsl? Aside from jq, the languages Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Visual Basic are mentioned. Aside from jq, all their articles say they are general purpose langs. I bet people also used "very very high level programming language". In fact here it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskProgramming/comments/4wxox6/any_interestinguseful_languages_you_guys_know_of/ I guess we now need an article describing "very very high level programming languages" or short VVHLL. Does my Deletion request already count as vote or do I manually have to vote somehow? ~2026-42166-88 (talk) 09:41, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

Your deletion request counts as a vote.

As AFD, we could merge to a new section in High-level programming language.

A VHPL is a programming language that is more abstract than a high level language. Can we base this debate on policy and not grasping at straws? SenshiSun (talk) 01:19, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

The current article says the abbreviation is VHLL. Clearly I'm not grasping straws and nobody has a clear idea what exactly it is called and what it's supposed to be including yourself. ~2026-41888-44 (talk) 06:51, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

I checked the 1992 paper you linked with the third link and it says: "This language has been defined and is cur-rently being implemented at the University of Essen;" It doesn't say ProSet has ever actually been finished or published. It doesn't have a German or English wikipedia article and likely doesn't meet relevance criteria either. The paper also does not use 'very high-level' anywhere in the text. It seems the buzzword is simply not important to ProSet. The other books you linked also don't exactly match the title "very high-level programming language": very high-level computer languages, Very High-Level Economics Computer, very high-level domain specific programming language. It's all random exaggerations rather than percise terminology. ~2026-42166-88 (talk) 10:15, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

I would also like to point out that almost all links to this page stem from the Template:Types_of_programming_languages and some See also headings. btw I found the mysterious ProSet article that was mentioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ProSet&diff=prev&oldid=1043065745 It got turned into a redirect in 2023 by a registered user. ~2026-41888-44 (talk) 12:20, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

Comment Is there a meaningful definition for the term? Google Books shows it refers to spreadsheets, ALGOL, a language supporting operations on sets, a language where code has fewer lines than in COBOL and an object-oriented high-level language. My interpretation of the definition used in articles using the term (which are more focused) is that the concept may have referred to efforts to develop high-level programming languages that are closer to human language (1, 2), which would also explain why the term's use dropped off after the 70s once the idea went out of vogue. PaulT2022 (talk) 00:36, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

"that are closer to human language" Vague statements like this have all already been used up on the term "high-level programming language". https://www.logiscool.com/en-de/blog/coding-tech/programming-explained-what-is-it-and-what-is-it-good-for "In 1972 C was developed. It is closer to human language than code language, so it is considered the first high-level programming language." ~2026-41888-44 (talk) 06:48, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

The thing is, there was a distinct movement in computer history, starting in the 1950s, which resulted in Fortran, ALGOL, COBOL, and Prolog being developed, all of which attempted to replicate human language constructs, arguably much higher level than C (C was invented almost two decades later and expected a programmer to manage memory and flow control explicitly). Is 'Very high-level programming language' a WP:COMMONNAME for this concept? If not, what is? Is the editors' preference to have a standalone article for it rather than a paragraph or a section in High-level programming language? I think the decision would need to depend on answers to these questions. I'm leaning WP:STUBIFY or WP:TNT per the Keep !vote above (The article can be rewritten.) at the moment. The article in its current form is unhelpful, it doesn't stand on its own and there's nothing useful to merge. PaulT2022 (talk) 20:13, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

"which resulted in Fortran, ALGOL, COBOL, and Prolog" I pressed ctrl+F and searched for "very high". 0 hits on all those pages. How can it be rewritten? The article High-level programming language already claims Fortran to be the the first "first high-level language to achieve wide practical adoption". It wouldn't make much sense to be the first high level programming language and the first very high level programming language in my opinion. ~2026-41888-44 (talk) 12:22, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

I struck my vote. I am no longer confident in it.

"A very high level programming language for data processing applications" by Hammer et al says the very high level languages allow people who aren't computer specialists to understand and use computer programs. According to that, a BDL is very high level. This Springer paper considers BDL to be it's own language.

Study Guide BCA 2021 contrasts VHLL with machine, assembly, and high level languages. Machine level is using direct binary, assembly uses basic instruction, high level converts the basic instruction to something more human readable, and very high level is even more abstract and usually specialized. It uses the example of Logo, which abstracts computer code into natural language, including error messages, but Logo's page does not define it as a VHLL. It also uses the examples of JavaScript and Python and those have been addressed above.

I'm not sure how to handle this now. There's enough documentation on the desire for and use of very high level languages in the 70s and 80s to make me think this wasn't a buzzword. If everything being described as a VHLL documents itself as an HLL, redirecting to High-level programming language might make sense. SenshiSun (talk) 18:02, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Keep. I found a couple of good sources speaking of VHLL in general.

An overview of nonprocedural languages equates VHLL to non-procedural languages and discusses what they mean in detail.

The Design of Very High Level Languages has a definition that is more refined: the emphasis on data flow rather than control flow for describing program logic. Because of this characteristic, such languages are sometimes described as non-procedural, as prescribing what is to be computed rather than how the computation is accomplished. This description is technically incorrect, since each of these languages has a well-defined operational semantics. But such languages do sup press a considerable amount of detail that would be exposed in the equivalent program written in a conventional high level language (HLL).

Interestingly, the second source also touches how the term is mostly used in practice, to describe languages that natively support operations on sets ('treat aggregates as primitive objects').

I'm having no problem with these definitions being substantive enough to describe a subclass of HLLs important historically, even if this classification would apply to most modern HLLs and thus is largely meaningless to us now.

Article, and especially its currently unsourced definition, can use a lot of improvement, but I think it's useful for it to stay, especially given that Nonprocedural language has been hijacked by something obscure and Declarative programming being focused on approach to programming rather than language design. PaulT2022 (talk) 04:23, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

Also, from Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science: The other path... was to adopt language conventions that allow expression only of the minimum necessary functional operations on data, not the internal structure of the data. This sort of “very high level” programming language has now become fairly standard; the object-oriented programming paradigm traces its roots to here. PaulT2022 (talk) 04:32, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

Merge to high-level programming language: After reading the sources provided here, I'm having trouble articulating the distinction between a high-level language and a very high-level programming language. The article currently states:

The term VHLL was used in the 1990s for what are today more often called high-level programming languages (not "very") used for scripting, such as Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Visual Basic.

That claim is backed by an article written by Greg Wilson, which states:

Over the past few years, I have done several medium-sized projects using both Perl and Python. At first, I was very excited by what these Very-High Level Languages (VHLLs) let me do, and how quickly. The more I played with them, however, the less satisfied I was. In particular, I no longer believe that they deserve the 'V' in their name. This article explores why, and suggests some ways in which they could evolve.
So, what is a "Very High-Level Language" anyway? The term first appeared in the mid-1990s to identify a group of languages typically used for rapid prototyping, one-time scripting, and similar tasks. Among their common features are: interactive interpretation (often, but not necessarily, preceded by silent compilation to bytecode); dynamic typing: values, rather than variables, have types, and some languages perform many conversions silently and automatically; much less boilerplate than mainstream languages (i.e. no variable declarations or #include directives); and some form of automatic memory management (usually reference counting).

Even if the term was used in the 70s or 80s, I agree with the nominator that it has fallen out of favor for decades now, and there is no need to maintain separate articles for the same fundamental concept. HyperAccelerated (talk) 04:49, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

HyperAccelerated (talk) 04:49, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, 🦅White-tailed eagle^{Talk to the eagle}Stalking eagle 00:11, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sandstein 13:00, 23 August 2026 (UTC)

Merge per above. The definitions are not clearly defined and the page doesn't meet WP:PAGEDECIDE. FaviFake (talk) 13:57, 23 August 2026 (UTC)

Comment I replaced vague unsourced definition in the article with the one used by sources consistently, as well as added some details about specific features attributed to VHLLs. Hopefully, updated article resolves valid vagueness concerns that were raised. PaulT2022 (talk) 00:31, 25 August 2026 (UTC)