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

Let me see...

[R2.0]

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

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.

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.

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: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!

[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.