Which languages do you know and why did you learn them?
The Polyglot Programmer
agilefrog.se
The Polyglot Programmer
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: The Polyglot Programmer
#2Which languages do you know and why did you learn them?
Re: The Polyglot Programmer
#3In my personal experience the most talented developers have been polyglots. Not that someone who knows only two syntaxes is not useful. It must be like musicians ... when you see a person get off the drums and pick up the guitar ... it just puts you in awe.
Re: The Polyglot Programmer
#4So it seems to me like this article just described being a programmer....
If you don't know at a minimum 4+ languages I'm not sure you should be called a programmer at all.
Re: The Polyglot Programmer
#5We should clarify that knowing how to write a "Hello World" in a programming language does not make you "know" that programming language. In other words, how much should you know about a language to call yourself a polyglot?
Re: The Polyglot Programmer
#6We should clarify that knowing how to write a "Hello World" in a programming language does not make you "know" that programming language. In other words, how much should you know about a language to call yourself a polyglot?
Take the analogy from natural languages, and you're fluent in any language where you can write simple programs without consulting the documentation (or only minimal consultation), conversant in any language you can get real work done in, and speak broken language X if you know Hello World and not much more.
A polyglot should be fluent in multiple languages, from at least a couple different families, and conversant in many more.
Re: The Polyglot Programmer
#7So it seems to me like this article just described being a programmer.... If you don't know at a minimum 4+ languages I'm not sure you should be called a programmer at all.
I understand where you're coming from, but I strongly disagree.
I've worked with multiple living counterexamples to your point - they only knew one language (sometimes old and non-maintained), but they could blow the next whiz-kid out of the water in terms of logical thinking and its application to software development.
IMO the only requirement to being a "programmer" is "programming", and restricting it any way beyond that hurts the field.
The guy that's been doing systems programming in C++ for 10 years should probably be considered a "programmer" despite not knowing the latest compile-to-js language of the week.
Re: The Polyglot Programmer
#8So it seems to me like this article just described being a programmer.... If you don't know at a minimum 4+ languages I'm not sure you should be called a programmer at all.
Although I have met many programmers who focus on a single language, say C# or Java, gets a lot of certifications etc.
Are they not programmers too?
Re: The Polyglot Programmer
#9In my personal experience the most talented developers have been polyglots. Not that someone who knows only two syntaxes is not useful. It must be like musicians ... when you see a person get off the drums and pick up the guitar ... it just puts you in awe.
Most programming languages are essentially the same; skills are directly transferable and you just have to learn minor syntactic difference. I would think it would be much harder to master guitar just because one already mastered drums, or the other way around.
Show me someone who has mastered computer graphics and say databases, then I'll be in awe.
Re: The Polyglot Programmer
#10We should clarify that knowing how to write a "Hello World" in a programming language does not make you "know" that programming language. In other words, how much should you know about a language to call yourself a polyglot?
Take the analogy from natural languages, and you're fluent in any language where you can write simple programs without consulting the documentation (or only minimal consultation), conversant in any language you can get real work done in, and speak broken language X if you know Hello World and not much more. A polyglot should be fluent in multiple languages, from at least a couple different families, and conversant in…
"Conversant in any language you can get real work done in", I think this is a pretty good baseline to define if you know a language or not. :)