Programming languages that every developer should know • Hacker News Board

Post by whiskeyjack » Sat, Dec 12, 2009, 8:30 PM UTC

daemin wrote: post #19

leftnode wrote: post #4

I'm not entirely sure I agree with this list. Here's some I would add: PHP - even if you loathe its every existence, if you're a web developer, you're going to come across it, might as well know it. Perl - text processing, data scraping, all around great language. Javascript - Like others have mentioned, I think its a great language, used in front end web development, and now moving to back end. Shell scripting - Of…

I agree with you that a shell scripting language should be in every programmers toolkit (even DOS command prompt and batch files count). Also if a programmer is dealing with the web or web applications then JavaScript is a must. However I must disagree on the other two languages, they do not need to be added to the list. Regarding PHP, you don't actually need to know it, as once you know C (and HTML) you can easily i…

I hate PHP with a passion but I think it's worth knowing about and I think the claim that "knowing C" makes it easy to interpret a PHP program is not a good assessment. Further, just knowning C doesn't mean you'll know the semantics of webdev... which is what PHP is all about. You get domain knowledge along with the language.

I'm also convinced that in almost every case that Ruby and Python are just fine in place of Perl... except for text processing.

Perl's regexp engine is top notch and is an extremely key part of the language in ways it just isn't in Python or Ruby, especially after the release of Perl 5.10. I don't see another language that can touch Perl there yet (feel free to correct me because I'd be interested to learn).