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Re:Poll: How many programming languages do you command fluen... by msluyter on Saturday January 04, 2014 @03:10PM (#7012671)
"How many programming languages are you able to use effortlessly to produce nontrivial programs?"

To be totally honest with myself I had to answer "none," although the answer to "how many programming languages are you able to use with moderate effort..." might have been in the 3 to 5 range, depending on your definition of "moderate." For example, even though I'm "fluent" with Java The Language, I find writing non-trivial programs with it often somewhat painful, usually due to struggles with various aspects of the ecosystem like hibernate, Spring, etc... Or, even though I could crank out a Python script pretty easily, I'm not sure I could do something "non-trivial." (Hell, if I even had to use argparse I'd definitely have to re-read the docs...)

A more objective way to frame the question would be something like "How many languages can you write fizbuzz in under N minutes without using google?" or something along those lines.

Re:Poll: How many programming languages do you command fluen... by nathell on Saturday January 04, 2014 @03:21PM (#7012726)
Yes, there's as many ways to understand the term "effortlessly" as respondents.

Understanding the question as "how many programming languages I had used in the past to produce nontrivial programs and would likely be able to do this again with little to no refreshing my knowledge", my answer is 8: Pascal, OCaml, C, Java, Haskell, Common Lisp, JS, Clojure (listed roughly in chronological order of learning).