Number of languages known [was Re: Python is readable] - somewhat OT

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 7:04 PM, Steve Howell <showell30 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> If you're that adept at learning languages, then I recommend learning
> Ruby just for kicks, but you're not missing *that* much, trust me.
> I'd skip past Ruby and learn CoffeeScript.

Sure. When I have some spare time... lessee, I think I have two spare
minutes in the year 2015 that aren't allocated yet! Oops. There they
go.

> Of the languages that are in the scripting family, you already know
> REXX (supreme elegance for its time), Perl (I hate it now, but loved
> it before Python), PHP (truly easy to learn, you can never take that
> away from it), and Javascript (horrible syntax, awful platform, but at
> least they have first-class functions).
>
> You have the Assembly/C/C++/Java progression--definitely good stuff,
> even if the ending to the movie was a bit of a letdown.

+1 on the description, heh.

> COBOL/Fortran/Ada gives you instance "old school" street cred.
>
> Haskell/Erlang/Scheme means you can hang out with the cool grad school
> kids in the CS/Math departments (no oxymoron intended).

Ehh, the ones from COBOL on were because I ran out of languages that
I'm really familiar with, and enumerated a few famous ones. But the
rest, I do actually know, and that's why I thought of them.

> I confess--I've never learned LilyPond, Modula-2, or LPC!  I mean, of
> course they're on my resume, just to get by HR screening, but that's
> just between you and me...

GNU LilyPond is a music publishing language (it's to music what TeX is
to English, kinda). Awesome language and system. I can show you a few
pieces I've done with Ly, it's beautiful music score from a very clean
input file. Modula-2 is a Pascal-derived language that I haven't
actually used, but it's cited as an influence in the development of
several others that I have used. LPC is Lars Somebody's C, originally
written as the basis for Lars Somebody's MUD or LPMUD, and was the
basis for Pike (with which I'm very familiar, as readers of this list
probably know).

Half the above languages aren't on my resume, mainly because I don't
really care about HR screening :)

ChrisA