Suggest terms to describe language proficiency level in your CV

I know this is going to seem old-fashioned, but I don't think much of using online tutorials to learn programming languages or platforms. These generally give you no more than a little taste of the language. To really learn a language, you need the equivalent of a "book", and in many cases, this means a real dead-tree book.

If you want to learn C, read K&R. If you want to learn C++, read Stroustrup. If you want to learn Lisp/Scheme, read SICP. Etc.

If you're not willing to spend more than $30 and a few hours to learn a language, you probably aren't going to learn it.

Yes, they're just general terms. It's to do with abstraction, and how close you are to what the computer's actually doing.

Here's a list of programming languages ranging from very low to very high level:

• Machine Code could probably be considered the lowest level programming language.

• Assembly language is at the level of telling the processor what to do. There is still a conversion step towards machine code.

• C is a step up from assembler, because you get to specify what you want to do in slightly more abstract terms, but you're still fairly close to the metal.

• C++ does everything that C can do but adds the capability to abstract things away into classes.

• Java/C# do similar things to C++ in a way, but without the opportunity to do everything you can do in C (like pointer manipulation in Java's case [thanks Joe!]). They have garbage collection though, which you have to do manually in C++.

• Python/Ruby are even higher level, and let you forget about a lot of the details that you would need to specify in something like Java or C#.

• SQL is even higher level (it's declarative). Just say "Give me all the items in the table sorted by age" and it will work out the most efficient way to carry this out for you.