Linked by Eugenia Loli on Fri 15th Sep 2006 22:48 UTC
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I wholeheartedly agree. I think a good programmer is one who seeks to broaden his views, learn new ways of solving problems, new perspectives. Learning languages that vary greatly in syntax and "way of thinking" will make a programmer improve even if she/he never uses those anymore after having learned them. Curiosity is very important there, I think.
Learning a wide range of languages that all look and work alike without needing to is probably a waste of time. I think the article is more about "Languages you should know to get a job right now" rather than "Languages you should learn". In any case, most of those can't really work as "bonus" to add to a resume.
Edited 2006-09-16 10:52




Member since:
2005-07-08
I guess the point of this article is to tell people which programming languages are the most popular (and therefore will get you the most jobs). However, if you ask other, perhaps more enlightened, hackers out there, the list would most likely be very different. I imagine Smalltalk, Lisp, Haskell, and other less mainstream languages would be on the list. Instead of just getting jobs for you, these languages would teach you different ways of programming, making you a better programmer.
The languages in the list, for the most part, don't really offer new ways of programming, but simply different syntax for the same way. PHP5, Java, C#, VB.net, and Ruby are all object oriented (though PHP programmers probably don't do must OOP considering PHP4's object system). Wouldn't be better to learn Smalltalk, the language all of these other languages got their goodies from? Who wants bad copies when you can have the original? Lisp has no equal in this list.
If you want to be a mediocre-decent programmer, then these languages are fine. If you want to be a good programmer, an excellent programmer, then you need to expand you horizons a bit and check out more interesting, yet unpopular, languages. You probably won't get a job programming in them any time soon, but you'll be able to carry the knowledge learned from them to other languages.