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by shinta42 4182 days ago
too many languages to learn...

elixir, nim, golang, clojure, haskell, elm, rust......there is no end...

3 comments

Do you happen to speak German, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish and French?

You don't need to learn all the programming languages, either.

Get a glimpse of a few to discover new ways of thinking, but specialize in a handful only.

That's utterly wrong comparison! Overall complexity of natural languages is probably HUNDREDS times the one of programming languages. Excluding C++, maybe. And also, with time you begin to be much more efficient in learning languages (that's true for natural languages too!), when it makes no sense really not to learn new languages.

That being said you don't really need more than a handful languages (selected for their adherence to various paradigms, as my sibling suggest) if you're not interested in inventing your own language.

Better than getting a glimpse on (a random, probably hyped-driven) few, is go to the fundamentals and select them paradigmatically.

Do something in each paradigm: Object Oriented, Functional, Logical.

Non-paradigmatic languages are strange creatures that will hurt the brain for no real good reason (only a epoch-dependent self-serving one)

Just learn the language for the project based on requirements and tooling.

For example, SQL when required to use databases, Objective-C when coding for iOS, Java on Android, JavaScript on the browser, C on UNIX, ...

Alternatively, take a CS degree in a good university and enjoy up to 5 years of multiple languages, usually one per CS area/paradigm.

On my university we had to program in Pascal, C, C++, Caml Light, Prolog, Java, Smalltalk, Algol, depending on the assignment.

Vala and Haxe are very promising too.