6 Languages You Wish the Boss Let You Use

Esther Schindler writes "Several weeks ago, Lynn Greiner's article on the state of the scripting universe was slashdotted. Several people raised their eyebrows at the (to them) obvious omissions, since the article only covered PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl and JavaScript. As I wrote at the time, Lynn chose those languages because hers was a follow-up to an article from three years back. However, it was a fair point. While CIO has covered several in depth, those five dynamic languages are not the only ones developers use. In 6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use, CIO looks at several (including Groovy, Scala, Lua, F#, Clojure and Boo) which deserve more attention for business software development, even if your shop is dedicated to Java or .NET. Each language gets a formal definition and then a quote or two from a developer who explains why it inspires passion."

Comments

Language Independent?

[Beardo the Bearded]

Your programming skills should not be tied to the language you use.

Re:Language Independent?

[dedazo]

Agreed, but even assuming you can become proficient in a given language quickly, there's usually a huge learning curve associated with the library(ies)/runtime. Not to mention the amount of time needed to arrive at the "this is how you actually do it" point for any language.

I can write a 20-line utility script in Perl or Scheme just fine. Applications are another matter.

Re:Language Independent?

[quanticle]

While your skills should certainly be language independent, it is also true that different languages make different things easy. Otherwise, why would we have so many of them?

I think the main thing I see is that the old argument, "Scripting languages are far too slow!" has finally been put to rest. All of the up and coming languages cited in the article are dynamically typed, interpreted (or bytecode-interpreted) languages.

Re:Language Independent?

[Xest]

Indeed but I can understand what the article might be getting at without having read it yet.

It's always best to use the best language for the job and far to many Java or .NET shops will use Java and .NET for everything even when there are much better tools for the job. It's a problem that arises time and time again and it took some time to convince many C++ developers that whilst C++ could do everything it wasn't necessarily best for everything.

If the article is suggesting these languages should be used for the sake of being used then that is rather daft and I don't know why we see many blogs like this (e.g. "Use F# it's awesome!"- well no, it's not in every scenario). If however it's suggesting that these languages each have a specific niche that it should be used for where it beats the likes of Java/.NET then yes he's on to something.

There's always a balance of course, a project consisting of 20 different languages would also almost certainly be rather stupid and messy, but there's a balance to strike for sure to achieve maximum efficiency, stability and features and in some cases there is merit in using more than one language.

Re:Language Independent?

[steveha]

I think the main thing I see is that the old argument, "Scripting languages are far too slow!" has finally been put to rest.

Well, that was always an oversimplification anyway. Too slow for what, specifically?

Even today, no one would seriously think about writing a video encoder entirely in a dynamic interpreted language. That's a very compute-intensive application and you can't afford the overhead. But how many of us write video encoders? There are many tasks for which the overhead of a dynamic interpreted language is no big deal.

Computers are really fast these days, so you can afford some overhead. If your trivial program runs in 0.6 seconds instead of 0.01 seconds, you may not care about the difference. And if you can write your program in 1/10 the time, you may come out way ahead. (And if the program is a one-off, that only needs to be run a few times, all you really care about is how much of your time it took to write the thing and get it correct.)

steveha

Re:Language Independent?

[zullnero]

I had this discussion with a recruiter the other day that was adamant about me inserting every single language and tool they wanted into every job description I had.

I said "the situation is very much like a mechanic where I have a wide range of tools I use to solve a problem, but the only thing that anyone cares about is that at some point, I used a wrench for something...without really caring about what the problem actually was."

Anyone can sit down, surf the web, find some sample code, stick it into a project, and then site that you used said tool in your resume...but it's not about that, it's about how you solved that problem.

Re:Language Independent?

[burris]

All of the up and coming languages cited in the article are dynamically typed, interpreted (or bytecode-interpreted) languages.

scala and f# are both statically typed

Re:Language Independent?

[Fred_A]

Your programming skills should not be tied to the language you use.

Quite. I use harsh language and it hasn't interfered with my programing skills whatsoever.
Stupid git.

Re:Language Independent?

[Frater 219]

Your programming skills should not be tied to the language you use.

Anyone who thinks this doesn't know very much about the diversity of programming languages, I suspect.

What you say may be true about a restricted set of languages: I would expect a good C++ programmer to be readily able to learn C# or Java; likewise I would expect a Python programmer to be readily able to learn Ruby. But that's because C++ and Java are not very far apart, nor are Python and Ruby.

But there are plenty of good C++ or Java programmers who would be completely lost in Lisp or Haskell. Why? Because a good Lisp or Haskell program does not break the problem down along the same lines as a good C++ or Java program. They involve a different set of skills. C++ coders do not tend to think of programming as extending the language to fit their problem space; they do not tend to use higher-order functions; they do not necessarily isolate I/O from core algorithm as Haskell programmers must; and they don't have access to anything even remotely resembling Lisp macros.

Now, you might say that a person is not a good programmer unless they have mastered a wide range of languages with vastly different approaches. But that's a much higher bar than most folks would use to qualify programmers.

Re:Language Independent?

[LarsWestergren]

All of the up and coming languages cited in the article are dynamically typed, interpreted (or bytecode-interpreted) languages.

Incorrect. Scala is very much statically typed (but has type inference).

Besides, what an article in a magazine considers hypeworthy may not correspond to real world usage. There are many opionions in the article put forward as facts.

Re:Language Independent?

[orclevegam]

Exactly! There's very little difference among the syntax and features of most languages. Sure there's big differences in some areas from one language to the next, but there's also usually big similarities to offset those. Once you've got 6 or 7 languages under your belt, there's very little that's genuinely "new" in any language, it's just a question of the subset of things you're already familiar with that happen to be included in X language.

The libraries and runtimes of any particular language on the other hand are unique for just about every language out there (exceptions being those that re-use large portions of existing libraries/runtimes such as Groovy which isn't so much a new language as it is an alternative syntax for Java), and that's where most of the time in "learning" a new language comes from. Just about any remotely competent programmer can write hello world in any language you choose with access to minimal documentation and about 5 minutes, but to write a clean and efficient implementation of any non-trivial program takes a serious time investment to learn the libraries and APIs.

The real question to ask about any particular language is what are its priorities? Does it focus on minimalist syntax in an attempt to speed development but at the cost of reduced readability? Does it use strong typing to improve efficiency and reduce runtime bugs but at the sacrifice of flexibility? In other words, what trade offs has the language made?

Re:Language Independent?

[0xABADC0DA]

However, if I wrote any sort of interactive application, a scripting language would not be my first choice. To me, it basically boils down to this: a "job" that cranks off, does it's own thing, and then ends, is a very good candidate for a scripted language. For an "application", I'm probably going to crack out C or C++ to tackle that one.

And I completely disagree about GUIs. The only requirement on language choice for an application is that user interaction happen in ~0.1 seconds or less, and on today's computers scripting languages can do this easily. So with that out of the way the choice is on how easy it is to write, how nice it looks, how reliable it is, etc. And in these categories scripting owns C, C++.

A lot of great programs are being written in JavaScript or Python these days. For instance, MusicBrainz' Picard is written in python, but you would never know it from using it. Even ones that are supposed to be 'fast'... users don't notice a performance difference between mercurial (python) and svn (c), but mercurial is already light-years better because people can understand the code (svn sourcecode is an absolute disaster re: readability).

I would go so far as to say that the primary reason to write most GUIs nowadays in C or C++ is just so they can't be reverse engineered.

Re:Language Independent?

[immcintosh]

Don't make the diversity out to be more than it is. You point out the two major breeds of programming languages which currently exist: declarative and imperative. That's fine. When it comes down to it, the "wide range" isn't any wider than these two underlying concepts. Once you understand how imperative languages fundamentally work you can translate that into any one, and the same goes for declarative languages.

So yeah, imperative programming skills translate across any largely imperative language, and declarative programming skills translate across any largely declarative language. I'd say that a really good programmer should be proficient in either, and some languages allow a degree of both (even C++, if you don't mind somewhat terrifying template trickery). Beyond that, this is his whole point. Once you understand those fundamentals, any other kind of variety just drops away.

Re:Language Independent?

[orclevegam]

You forgot to give a clear example of what you meant by that learning curve. If anyone has trouble with that, try to picture the difference between C and C# with .NET. Good luck using C to do what you can do in C# using just a few clicks.

You're conflating the tools with the language. There's nothing inherent within C# that cannot also be done with C given the proper libraries. Likewise there's nothing that you can do in C that you cannot also do in assembly. Of course the effort involved will be different from the standpoint of the programmer using the language depending on what libraries one utilizes. When you add in tools (such as IDEs like Visual Studio which .Net programmers tend to forget is different from the language) certain operations are optimized further in that you can use large chunks of what is essentially boilerplate code inserted automatically by the IDE, but you also sacrifice control and flexibility in that case (a well written tool should allow you to override it, but once you've made that jump it's essentially useless for further adjustments of that same piece of code).

An honest appraisal of a language should be done in two parts. First you should compare the language itself. What features does it provide, what sacrifices have been made, how stable is the language, etc. Secondly the tools, libraries, and IDEs should be compared. Any decision concerning a language needs to factor in both the things the language excels at, as well as the availability of tools and libraries for the language to accomplish the task you're attempting.

Re:Language Independent?

[Hatta]

Have scripting languages gotten faster, or have the computers we run them on gotten faster?

Re:Language Independent?

[dedazo]

there's very little that's genuinely "new" in any language, it's just a question of the subset of things you're already familiar with that happen to be included in X language.

Yes, this is a key point. All modern all well-established runtimes provide effectively the same set of services. Zip up some files, create an HTTP request to download a file, parse a command line. The trick is to become accustomed to "the way it's done" for your platform (and here by platform I mean language+runtime library+VM as applicable). Being able to find where everything is and how things interoperate in the context of whatever it is you're writing for fun or profit.

After many years of COM-based VB and C++ code, I started to learn Python during my transition to .NET back in 2001-2002. I consider myself a relatively good software developer, and I estimate that it took me about a year of constant C#/.NET usage and slightly more for Python to get to the point where I felt comfortable creating professional (i.e., pay the bills), full-fledged solutions with them.

Learning a language's syntax takes three days. Domain knowledge of the platform and runtime you're coding against with said language is typically a slow process, no matter how good a coder you happen to be.

Re:Language Independent?

[pimpimpim]

Of course you are partly correct, but each time I try to run the music player on the eee (amarok), I find that it is written in such a bloated way that it hangs the music each time I open a page in firefox. I now just run mplayer directly, using up about 0.1% of cpu power. We don't have to write everything by hand in assembly anymore, but at least a basic optimization of the overhead should be fundamental in every software project.

Re:Language Independent?

[Frater 219]

There are not just two kinds of programming languages. There are a whole bunch of different features that languages can have, that affect how programmers think about problems. I mentioned a few of them above, but consider:

Extensible syntax. Some programming languages have extensible syntax; they allow you to define macros or "parsing words" that act like new syntactic constructs. Lisp is the usual example here, but some of the stack-based languages, like Factor, also have this property. C++, Java, and Python do not have it. Extensible languages allow programmers to create embedded domain-specific languages, moving the language's syntax closer to that of the problem domain.

Type system differences. This isn't just static vs. dynamic typing, either. In Haskell, you create types that describe the meanings of the values your program will manipulate. In contrast, C++ programmers usually use types just to describe the implementation of data structures in memory. In Common Lisp you can talk about "the type composed of integers from 0 to 10".

Density and function length. Languages that are very dense and do not have a lot of syntactic sugar tend to encourage very small functions. Languages that are more verbose tend to encourage longer functions, if only because it takes more words to get an idea out.

Object system. There are many kinds of object-oriented languages: prototype-based ones like JavaScript, static ones like C++, multiple-dispatch ones like Common Lisp, and so on. Interfaces? Multiple inheritance? Mixins? Around methods? MOP? The presence or absence of these features greatly influences how you can use objects in a program.

These are not minor differences. They dramatically change the way that you have to approach problems in order to write good code in a language. If you write Common Lisp as if it were C++, you are going to be producing bad code. If you write functions in Haskell that are as long as the ones you'd write in Java, you are going to produce incomprehensible code.

Vulgar language.

[Trespass]

Oh, you meant programming. Well, fuck it. =P

Language Independent!

[krischik]

Right on! A good programmer will learn any programming language in a fortnight. But sadly average programers don't.

Re:Language Independent!

[Anonymous Coward]

How quickly will a good programmer learn Malbolge?

Re:Language Independent!

[dgatwood]

About as quickly they learn brainf**k or Whitespace, I'd imagine, and it is about as useful....

Re:Language Independent!

[$RANDOMLUSER]

"Malbolge - named for the eighth circle of hell". Interesting. So the Nth circle of hell is named Perl?

Re:Language Independent!

[zerOnIne]

No, that would be the name of the the $_ circle of hell.

Re:Language Independent!

[RoceKiller]

Sure a good programmer will learn any programming language very fast. The thing that takes time to learn is the compiler, and the standard libraries available with that language and compiler. A good programmer knows his compiler inside out, that you can not necessarily pick up in a fortnight.

Re:Language Independent!

[pthisis]

I'd consider the minimum for a really good programmer to include at least a project or two's worth of exposure to:

At least one assembly language or pseudo-asm.
At least one mid-level pointer-driven language (C/C++/etc)
At least one statically typed functional language (ML/Haskell/etc)
At least one dynamically typed functional language (Lisp/Scheme/etc)
At least one dynamically typed OO language (Smalltalk/Python/ruby/etc)
At least one higher-level statically typed OO language (Java/Ada/C#/etc)

That still leaves some holes that could be tricky to pick up, and ideally you'd know:
At least one stack-based language (Forth/Postscript/etc)
At least one imperative programming language (Prolog/etc)
At least one DBC-centered language (Eiffel/Sather/etc)
At least one concurrency-oriented language (erlang, etc)

But you can have a long and successful career as a top-shelf programmer without really needing that latter group.

And yes, those monikers are a bit arbitrary; you can do full OO in Lisp, functional programming in Python, etc. So you can get away with a lot fewer languages than there are on the list, as long as you learn the different programming models. It tends to be a little easier to learn a model with a language that's been used that way traditionally.

I'm sure I'm missing some areas, too.

Re:Language Independent!

[arevos]

I'd consider the minimum for a really good programmer to include at least a project or two's worth of exposure to...

I'm familiar with languages in all those categories, but I wouldn't consider them all essential. It's important to have a wide range of experience outside the norm, if only because it demonstrates an enjoyment of learning new things. But I don't necessarily think that a programmer's experience needs to be comprehensive for them to be good at their craft.

Re:Language Independent!

[hpoul]

and to get your boss to acknowledge it you might add some other postfix like '.net', or some weird character '#' or just '2.0' ... sometimes even 'enterprise' does the job ..

Re:Language Independent!

[Eskarel]

This is true, but totally beside the point.

Learning a new language involves lost productivity, and if you choose a language that isn't in mainstream use it will involve lost productivity for everyone you hire to use it.

Generally speaking new languages don't offer enough benefit over the old languages to justify that expenditure.

It's the thing everyone always forgets, even if learning something new is easy, the new thing has to be sufficiently better than the old thing to justify the learning.

Boutique languages are almost never a good investment because even if you hire a programmer who loves to learn the liklihood that they've learned any particular language is fairly low. Languages become popular not because they are superior in any technical sense, but because they provide a benefit for a project which outweighs the investment cost.

Just because a programmer can learn a language doesn't mean it makes financial sense for them to do so on company time.

Re:Language Independent!

[Smallpond]

It must be true that this takes time. I've been programming in Perl for years and have yet to learn anything about the compiler.

Re:Language Independent!

[ari_j]

Enterprise Objective Malbolge# 2.0 needs to exist. Who wants to help create it?

Re:Language Independent!

[pthisis]

Exposure is fine, but "at least a project or two"?

A project or two seems about the minimum to learn a language. It's pretty much impossible to really learn a language without writing _something_ in it.

How many production projects in Eiffel, or Sather, or Ada, or Erlang, have you, or at least some people you know personally, taken part in?

This seems like a strawman; most learning projects are a lot smaller than anything production (e.g. compare your compiler design class in university with gcc).

The point of learning a lot of languages is mainly for exposure to multiple programming paradigms (hence why I split things up that way). Even if you never use the language itself at work, it's a lot easier to get your head around, say, functional programming by going through ML culture shock than trying to write a functional program in Java when you don't really know what that means. Once you know it, you can do it in any language.

But to answer the question:
I know dozens of people who are working (or have worked) on Ada projects, and I've done so in the past.

One of our developers left our company 3 months ago to work on a commercial Erlang product, making him the 2nd I know, and we're considering using it at my current workplace.

I don't personally know anyone using Sather or Eiffel commercially.

Let me see...

[R2.0]

Klingon, Swedish Chef, Elvish (can't pronounce Dwarvish), Pirate, Porn Star Dialogue, and Latin.

Re:Let me see...

[R2.0]

"There's dialog in Pron?"

If you count the grunting and moaning - THAT would perk up a Powerpoint presentation.

Re:Let me see...

[PinkPanther]

You remember the brand of hairspray? Man, now THAT's advertising you simply couldn't buy!

The Tags say it all.

[Anonymous Coward]

donotwant developers programming

Sounds like the corporate policies I've gotten used to.

Wait and see.

[LWATCDR]

I remember when ADA was going to be the next big thing. Then it was SmallTalk. I actually used Modual-2 back in the day. C? was never going to take off. It was too big and slow for micro computers and not high level enough for minicomputers. The only people that would ever really find use for it where those few people that used Unix.
Before that it was PL-1 and Simula. I left out the fourth generation languages that where going to let everybody write their own programs. Oh and programing by making flow charts... Or was it Hypercard that was the future...
Well you get the idea. Most where really good programing languages but there seems to be a limited number of languages that reach critical mass. I remember Comal which was a great little language on the old 8 bit machines but it only became popular in Europe.
Oh well we will see what happens this time.

The lost art

[Alzheimers]

If you can't write it in a .BAT file, it can't be done.

LOLCODE

[Shikaku]

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
      UP VAR!!1
      IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHX
      VISIBLE VAR
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE //outputs 1-10

Re:LOLCODE

[paulthomas]

OMG WAU!!! U CAN HAS javascript implementashun!!

JAVASCRIPT VERZHUN moer liek:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR IZ 0
IM IN YR LOOP
            UPZ VAR!!1
            IZ VAR BIGR THAN 10?
                            GTFO.
              KTHX
            VISIBLE VAR
KTHX
KTHXBYE

Javascript Lolcode Inturpretur.

KTHXBYE, WTFBBQ!

*ducks*

Re:LOLCODE

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad part is, that's a real language. Someone wrote a BF compiler in LOLCODE(http://forum.lolcode.com/viewtopic.php?id=51).

I'd like to use...

[owlnation]

English, instead of Buzzwordish.

How about...

[Minwee]

"Six Languages You Wish The Yo-Yo Who Got Fired Before You Had Never Used"?

We could start with "Incomprehensible" and "I'm Just Learning This" and go on from there.

Re:Scripting Languages?

[pseudorand]

Furthermore, I wish my job was to sit around all day and learn only new stuff each day../

I used to have that job, writing for a magazine. I was really excited about it at first, but I quickly realized that to write intelligently about a technology you have to get to know it by using it in the real world, which simply takes time. I found that I simply couldn't get to know some new piece of hardware of software well enough to write anything decent about it before my article deadlines, and I felt I was getting dumber every day. So I went back into the programming and sysadmin world and now I feel like I know what I'm doing again (at least with the technologies I use regularly).

I think Lynn Greiner may be in the same boat. She asks:

CIO.com: What effect has the growing prevalence of Ajax had on the adoption of the various languages? Are people adapting the techniques to languages other than JavaScript?

The question doesn't really make sense. If you know what Ajax is, you know it's specific to the web browser/web server model. It solves the problem of the web server not knowing the full state of the browser. Rather than having the server regenerate an entire page and try to preserve client-side changes to that page, Ajax is simply a standard to let the browser get data from the server without reloading the entire page. Maybe it sort of makes sense if you use a client/server model with some other language (like tcl/tk), but then you have access to TCP/IP libraries and the command line. Ajax is only necessary because browsers can't just let a client open arbitrary TCP streams and run arbitrary commands. If it could, there would be a million different ways to do the same thing easily (think wget | grep | cut | sed | ...).

The people she interviewed seemed to agree with me:

Boyd:... The techniques of Ajax are really only applicable inside the browser.

Dice: Ajax is entirely a JavaScript phenomenon

Holden: Since Ajax is simply asynchronous network calls, it is not affecting the adoption of any specific language beyond more JavaScript usage in webpages.

Lam: Ajax is popular because browsers are popular. JavaScript's popularity is directly tied to the fact that it's deployed on virtually all browsers today.

Pall: Ajax is a very specific technology that allows webpages to rise above mediocre user-interfaces and become true applications using JavaScript.

I think Lam's comments are the most interesting. JavaScript isn't a horrible language, and it should get credit for helping people realize that useful things could be done in interpreted languages, but aren't we all really itching for a better language on the browser. Too bad the W3C moves at a sails pace and Microsoft and Mozilla disagree on things simply to disagree with each other half the time.

Re:Using a different language is expensive. Summar

[arevos]

Boo is 0.8.2 - If you wish your boss would let you use this, you're fired.

I once created an in-house fork of Boo for file processing. It worked reasonably well as a stopgap solution, and I wasn't fired at the end of it.

I could understand a more generic Functional Lang like Hask,OCaml,Erlang but F#?

Haskell, OCaml and Erlang don't have access to the .NET libraries. F# does, so you get the benefits of a statically typed functional language with the extensive .NET APIs.

Groovy - JVM Java scripting for when Java is too hard for you? Wow. You're fired.

Groovy is a superset of Java functionality, not a subset. You can do everything in Groovy that you can in Java, but there are a lot of things in Groovy that Java lacks, most notably closures.

So if anything, I'd contend that Groovy is harder to learn than Java.

Clojure - Functional syntax on the JVM. Why would I use this and for what when there's no support?

The mailing list is quite active, so I assume you're talking about a paid support contract or something? Can you even get that kind of support with, say, Scala or Ruby? Would you even want to?

Lua... Chances your developer wants to use it inappropriately = 99%

Uh, hire better developers?

I mean, really, if you're working with morons, then sure, you might not want them to use a language they can screw things up too badly in. But it's probably better to just hire competent programmers in the first place.

Groovy

[lgbr]

I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I had asked a programmer to replace our crummy Jython interface with Groovy. Ten minutes after I had asked him to do it he says he's done. He shows me a clean interface complete with the functionality for saving files, copying and pasting, search and replace, and a handy output section. I had even asked him to integrate it with the rest of our program, but a simple 'import com.ourcompany.ourproduct.package' in the groovy console already had that solved. Now development has sped up slightly as we even do some development in the groovy console so that small tweaks and changes don't mean we have to wait for a re-compile.

I am one boss who welcomes groovy.

Honestly, no I don't wish

[Sarusa]

These seem to be the languages you wish your boss let you use if you're a corporate guy who's already in a shotgun wedding with JVM or .NET (and it is CIO Magazine, so this makes sense). And then for some reason Lua, which is a neat language, but if it's good for your problem domain you're already using it - and it seems out of place with the others listed.

My boss lets us use Python for most things (hell, he loves it, even though he's not a programmer, since he likes how fast and easy it makes dev and maintenance), and I don't see any reason at all to even contemplate switching to one of these. Not that they look bad, but since we're not already shackled to the JVM or .NET I just don't see a compelling draw.

Re:Using a different language is expensive. Summar

[Samah]

I love Lua. I'm glad it was mentioned because I think it's one of the most underused languages I've had the chance to work with.

I had a GPS daemon I needed to write for an MDT (Mobile Data Terminal) Windows CE environment, and the CE API is just a complete shocker. In the end I managed to compile a branch of Lua called LuaX (has wince libraries) which comes with a bunch of awesome modules. A few of the modules did exactly what I needed (serial port and network sockets). One simple script handled everything I needed. I'm not saying it was the only solution, but I found it to work quite well, and the libraries were all there for me.

There's even a project called Kepler to use Lua for server-side scripting (similar to PHP).

F# has terrible reviews

[QuestionsNotAnswers]

Google F# bad

Although it used to be worse:
Google F#

Prolog imperative?

[Enter the Shoggoth]

I've worked with well over 30 languages in the last 20 or so years, covering the entire gamut you describe and not once have I ever seen Prolog referred to as imperative.

Prolog is a declarative language (making it a cousin of functional languages) based on the resolution of horn clauses.

Imperative languages are based upon the idea of destructive update of state, echoing the Von Neumann architecture of the machine upon which they likely run.

In other words, on a diagram of programming language paradigms they are most likely polar opposites.

I'd consider the minimum for a really good programmer to include at least a project or two's worth of exposure to:

At least one assembly language or pseudo-asm. At least one mid-level pointer-driven language (C/C++/etc) At least one statically typed functional language (ML/Haskell/etc) At least one dynamically typed functional language (Lisp/Scheme/etc) At least one dynamically typed OO language (Smalltalk/Python/ruby/etc) At least one higher-level statically typed OO language (Java/Ada/C#/etc)

That still leaves some holes that could be tricky to pick up, and ideally you'd know: At least one stack-based language (Forth/Postscript/etc) At least one imperative programming language (Prolog/etc) At least one DBC-centered language (Eiffel/Sather/etc) At least one concurrency-oriented language (erlang, etc)

But you can have a long and successful career as a top-shelf programmer without really needing that latter group.

And yes, those monikers are a bit arbitrary; you can do full OO in Lisp, functional programming in Python, etc. So you can get away with a lot fewer languages than there are on the list, as long as you learn the different programming models. It tends to be a little easier to learn a model with a language that's been used that way traditionally.

I'm sure I'm missing some areas, too.

Re:some of those did kind of take off, fwiw

[LWATCDR]

Yes but Ada was supposed to be the next big thing as was SmallTalk. Frankly I really like SmallTalk. Squeak is really nice.
More people should play with Squeak including me but time is the issue as always.
There seems to be a burst of new languages and then they fad to a select few.
In scripting Perl and PHP are to old standards. Python and Ruby are the new hotness. My guess is that Python has staying power. LUA and some of the others mentioned are the new new hotness.
What most people don't get is there is a good reason your boss will not let you use those. What happens when they fade and you have this cool app that nobody knows how to extend anymore?
Programs tend to be living things You add new features over time. So a hot programmer decides to use snobol4. Five years later nobody knows how to write snobol4 the language hasn't had an update in two years and you are in a world of hurt.