[yami]

Hi, I’m in my third year in a French IT School. I’ve used A LOT of C/C++ during my first years and now I’m learning bit of Java and C#. I learned Ruby On Rails through a 6 months internship while I was in my first year and I fell in love with the ruby world. I also used some OCaml (and this is actually great!) and some x86_64 ASM at school.

So I’ve read all your comments and I’ve seen a lot of kind of esoteric languages. I mean that I’ve already heard about them but I’ve never figured out if they are really used in companies. I also love to check on new things and look at new languages with cool syntax and fun features but is it really useful? Are languages like Erlang, J, F#, Rust, Haskell or Nim really used in your companies? Are they worth to learn to find a job? From what I’ve seen / what I know node.js has grown A LOT this year. I’ve seen several job offers asking for node.js. I think I am going to focus on this from now on.

Thanks for reading / giving your opinion in comments ;)

[V-2]

Erlang or Haskell - rare, but esoteric??

I don't think it's fair to lump them into the same category as Rust (which may or may not gain popularity, it's too early to say), or Nim (now that's truly an esoteric one).

[yami]

Well Erlang and Haskell aren't the most common programming languages that I can think of. I've never seen any job offer (in my area) for those. But I often find articles talking about what people achieve using those and I find it fun but are they really useful in the 'grown ups' world?

[V-2]

Well, maybe it's a matter of naming here, because while of course they're very domain specific - an esoteric programming language is one that's rather not designed with usability in mind (but as a joke, or to prove some point etc).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language or http://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list - noone would put Haskell under that category...

[codygman]

They are both very useful for solving real world problems, yes.

[yami]

Well would you say to someone who is going to look for an IT job in a few years to learn those languages?

[codygman]

For the most part yes, but it depends on the position they're trying to get.