On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 3:18 AM, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > On 11/12/2013 16:04, Chris Angelico wrote: >> >> I strongly believe that a career >> programmer should learn as many languages and styles as possible, but >> most of them can wait. > > > I chuckle every time I read this one. Five years per language, ten > languages, that's 50 years I think. Or do I rewrite my diary for next week, > so I learn Smalltalk Monday morning, Ruby Monday afternoon, Julia Tuesday > morning ...
Well, I went exploring the Wikipedia list of languages [1] one day, and found I had at least broad familiarity with about one in five. I'd like to get that up to one in four, if only because four's a power of two. More seriously: Once you've learned five of very different styles, it won't take you five years to learn a sixth language. I picked up Pike in about a weekend by realizing that it was "Python semantics meets C syntax", and then went on to spend the next few years getting to know its own idioms. I'd say anyone who knows a dozen languages should be able to pick up any non-esoteric language in a weekend, at least to a level of broad familiarity of being able to read and comprehend code and make moderate changes to it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list