The languages you learn are unimportant. Any programmer worth their salt can learn enough of any programming language in a day to do maintenance work. (So long as the language is in a style they've been exposed to. More on this later.) The important thing is to know how to program.

Learn logic, algorithms, and common bloopers. Just because you can program in XYZ doesn't mean you can program well. Just because you have never programmed in XYZ doesn't mean you won't be able to, in a week or two. (This is a big nit of mine with the hiring process currently in vogue in the US.)

There have been a large number of nodes regarding programming language style. To summarize:

  1. Imperative - ASM, C, COBOL, VBasic, Perl
  2. Object-Oriented - C++, Java, VBasic, Ada, Perl
  3. Functional - LISP, Haskell, Scheme, Perl
  4. Logical - makefiles, Prolog, Perl (kinda)
Imperative is "Do A, then Do B" type programming; your standard procedural programming. OO is "Build a bunch of things, then tell them to do stuff." Functional is "Build a few functions, tell them to do stuff." The difference between imperative and functional is that functional will build a bunch of other functions that will do the work. Logical is "Make a bunch of rules, then follow all rules until you run of stuff to do, then stop."

Programmers that can do a given style can learn any language in that style very quickly, but have serious issues with learning any other style. (A common example is imperative learning OO.) A nice thing about Perl is the ability to be exposed to the concepts behind all the styles. They're very different in how you think about it.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

In reply to Re: Which language would be most helpful? by dragonchild
in thread Which language would be most helpful? by mrpilot

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