Ask HN: You can only be fluent in 3 programming languages. Which ones?

go for apis and apps, java for android and swift for ios.

go, python, javascript

sounds good to me without giving much thought

Well, this question has different ways it can be answered. Here's the approach I'd take to be versatile:

1. Javascript because there is no other choice for the browser. Even things that compile to JS will occasionally have you debugging the transpiled code to figure out what went wrong;

2. C. This is really C or C++ as you need something that's close to the metal and on some occasions nothing else will do. C probably edges out C++ in terms of versatility here;

3. Honestly, it'd probably be Java, which makes me sad. I'd like it to be Go but Java is just too ubiquitous and useful to ignore. It covers you for both a ton of web apps and Android development.

An alternative to (3) is really Python. The above list doesn't include any scripting languages, which is a weakness. Python covers this but really loses (first class) Android support. I don't like Python for large systems either.

For fun it might look a lot different eg Go, Swift and yes even C++. It really depends on what your goals are.

1. Ruby - Productive dynamic glue language that gets things done. Chosen over Python because of jRuby and significantly better JVM integration than jython. jRuby opens up the entire Java ecosystem of both libraries and containers within your Ruby code but without having the productivity drop of having to do everything in Java to use it. Also chosen over the other JVM based languages because those are limited to the JVM where it might not be necessary or beneficial. Ruby plays in both worlds better than anything else and is surrounded by so many excellent tools for productivity, infrastructure management and server scripting that it is in my opinion, the best single language to KNOW. Not the best to do everything by a long shot, but it has the best balance of everything when all factors are measured; putting a premium on productivity because if you're going to be able to do that much you need to be able to do it in a timely manner.

2. PHP - There's a reason so much of the web is powered by PHP and that reason is simplicity for small stuff and dirt cheap hosting. PHP scales down better than any other language in that you can fill up a TB hard drive on a 512mb server and all of that code is going to run. It's too useful for the likes of simple sites to forgo, despite its other issues as a language.

3. Go - For high volume concurrency operations and other backbone "must be performant" code. That's where Go really excels and it's significantly faster to write this type of code with Go than with Java. Go just isn't there yet for your typical "websites" so it tends to be better for backend operations or APIs.

Note: I'm purposefully leaving Javascript off of the list because while it is necessary to know, fluency isn't required - similar to SQL. If either of those are list-worthy, then I'd choose SQL sheerly for scaling sake.