Ask Slashdot: How Often Do You Switch Programming Languages?

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: I always see a lot of different opinions about programming languages, but how much choice do you really get to have over which language to use? If you want to develop for Android, then you're probably using Java...and if you're developing for iOS, then you've probably been using Swift or Objective-C. Even when looking for a job, all your most recent job experience is usually tied up in whatever language your current employer insisted on using. (Unless people are routinely getting hired to work on projects in an entirely different language than the one that they're using now...)

Maybe the question I really want to ask is how often do you really get to choose your programming languages... Does it happen when you're swayed by the available development environment or intrigued by the community's stellar reputation, or that buzz of excitement that keeps building up around one particular language? Or are programming languages just something that you eventually just fall into by default?
Leave your answers in the comments. How often do you switch programming languages?

Comments

When you pry my keyboard from my cold dead fingers

[macker]

But then, I only fry firmware-burgers, so 'C' and assembler are it...unless you wanna count all the assembler flavors, then it would be 2 or 3 times a day...

How many pieces of hardware are in the system?

[JoeMerchant]

Small embedded ARM processors: C

Mid-sized embedded Linux: C++

Bloaty multi-core GUI with printer drivers, etc. running on Windows: C#

Cloudy web servery type stuff: Javascript

And, all of these can be found in a single shipping product. Go Team Silo Go! Hope it sticks when you toss it over the wall!

Man, I'm glad I got out of IT

[DNS-and-BIND]

One thing I do not miss (besides being woken up by the pager) is having my knowledge obsoleted and being forced to learn new things. Oh, but you're supposed to never stop learning, stay young, blah blah blah. Bullshit, that's a bunch of pro-corporate propaganda. Now, I learn something...it sticks. 5 years later, I still know the thing. In fact, after 5 years I'm probably quite good at it. I will stay quite good at it until it changes (slowly or not at all) or I die. Sure, new laws and regulations come along every so often and they must be mastered, but it is nothing like IT. I like this way much better than becoming an expert and then having to start all over at square 1.

Re:Well...

[Pseudonym]

Disconnect your computer from the internet, and write a fully conforming Ada 2012 compiler in Common Lisp.

Interestingly, Ada isn't one of them. Nor is Python, interestingly.

If you're curious how I got to 60, there are a lot of languages in there which are distinct languages with distinct specs, but are essentially dialects.

Consider the Turner family of languages, for example. I've used KRC, Miranda, Orwell, Miracula, and Haskell. All of them are distinct languages with their own specs. I can remember writing a Prolog interpreter in at least three of them. I can still explain to you some of the key differences between them. if you know two of them you know them all, and besides, one of them is still around.

Other examples of distinct-but-close-enough languages which I have used in a nontrivial manner are Eiffel and Sather, SML and O'Caml (never used Alice), Smalltalk and Newspeak, Object Pascal and Delphi, Agda and Coq (never used Epigram), PostScript and Forth, Java and Modula-3.

And then there's logic languages. I've used (again, seriously used) Prolog, Datalog, Mercury, Oz, Gödel, and KL1. All of them are distinct languages with crucial differences, but so closely related that once you know two of them well (say, one dynamically typed and one statically typed variant), you can get quite productive in most of them within an afternoon.

Oh, and four different assembly languages.

Re: Well...

[prefec2]

60 looks a little bit too mich, but Ehen I look back, I learned several BASIC dialects, Z80 assembler, Turbo Pascal, 8086 ASM, Fortran, C, Modula-2, Scheme, Elisp, Prolog, Objective-C, PHP, Java, Xtend. That are 15 counting the Basiscs AS two languages. I also used XSLT, XSD, Corba which are a transformation language, a data model language and a component interface declaration language. I also know some stuff in HTML, CSS, SQL, EQL,bash, csh, make, ant and maven.
So if I count all those DSLs as programming languages, I am close to 30. Maybe he can provide us with a list.

Re:Is this question from five years ago?

[TheRaven64]

There are two things that make people hate Ruby:

The first is the implementation of the language. You start with Smalltalk, take out the bits of Smalltalk that are difficult to compile, and then end up with an implementation of a language that is slower than something like Squeak / Pharo, which are simple bytecode interpreters. That doesn't fill anyone with confidence in the language. I can understand Ruby not being faster than a JIT-compiled Smalltalk, but there's no excuse for it not having been faster than a reasonable Smalltalk bytecode interpreter from day one.

Then there's the community. The Ruby community spent a good decade taking 30-year-old ideas and claiming that Ruby had made them possible, that Ruby developers had invented them, and this is why Ruby is so awesome. Rails is a good example of this. ORMs have existed since the '80s. WebObjects was arguably[1] the first ever web app development framework and it included EOF, which did the same thing as Rails in Objective-C (later in Java) and has had an open source reimplementation since the late '90s (GNUstepWeb, later SOPE, the latter of which is used by [Scalable] OpenGroupware.org). Oh, and WebObjects had much better developer tools than Rails, supported multithreading long before Ruby was able to run multithreaded, and was an order of magnitude or so faster.

[1] There's some disagreement, related to announcement / beta / shipping dates, but it's either the first or second.