Re:Languages a well-rounded programmer ought to know
by achompas on Thursday March 22, 2012 @01:28PM
(#3740879)
functional languages can do some really cool things and some people swear by them, but none of them are things that you should know for professional purposes.
Thinking "functionally" has tons of holistic benefits for a programmer. It can also shrink your code base significantly.
Why ignore these gains if they can make you a better professional coder?
a low level language - C is the most important one by a million miles
a high level enterprise oriented language - Java or C#
a high level scripting language - Python, Ruby, Perl
Unix Shell Scripting (bash is the most popular i guess)
the frontend web stack - HTML/CSS/JavaScript
obviously people will have widely varying degrees of proficiency between those categories, but everyone should be at least familiar with those categories if not an expert in all of them. you probably should be an expert in one of them though. having a "native tongue" is a useful thing.