Characteristics of Programming Languages

• Readability: A good high-level language will allow programs to be written in some ways that resemble a quite-English description of the underlying algorithms. If care is taken, the coding may be done in a way that is essentially self-documenting.
• Portability: High-level languages, being essentially machine independent, should be able to develop portable software.
• Naturalness:- A good language should be natural for the application area, for which it has been designed. That is, it should provide appropriate operators, data structures,  control structures, and a natural syntax to facilitate the users to code their problem easily and efficiently.  
• Generality: Most high-level languages allow the writing of a wide variety of programs, thus relieving the programmer of the need to become expert in many diverse languages.
• Brevity: Language should have the ability to implement the algorithm with less amount of code. Programs expressed in high-level languages are often considerably shorter than their low-level equivalents.
• Error checking: Being human, a programmer is likely to make many mistakes in the development of a computer program. Many high-level languages enforce a great deal of error checking both at compile-time and at run-time.
• Cost: The ultimate cost of a programming language is a function of many of its characteristics.
• Familiar notation: A language should have familiar notation, so it can be understood by most of the programmers.
• Quick translation: It should admit quick translation.
• Efficiency: Programs written in a good programming language are efficiently translated into machine code, are efficiently executed, and acquire as little space in the memory as possible.  
• Modularity: It is desirable that programs can be developed in the language as a collection of separately compiled modules, with appropriate mechanisms for ensuring self-consistency between these modules.
• Widely available: Language should be widely available and it should be possible to provide translators for all the major machines and for all the major operating systems.