Subj : Re: What things should successful programmers-to-be learn right now?
To   : comp.programming
From : Rob Thorpe
Date : Wed Jul 27 2005 08:41 am

wee wrote:
> I do understand that I'm vaguely new to the industry.
>
> However, more to the point: In what industries are the languages used
> that I listed above from Dave Vandervies' post? Perhaps an answer to
> that would be more helpful to all of us than your unfortunately snide
> comment.

Dave's list is not targetted at learning programming languages it's
targetted at learning about programming.
Repeating Dave's list below:

> At least one of:
>     Scheme
>     Haskell
>     SML
>     CAML

These teach you about the power of higher-order programming, lists and
sophisticated data structures.

> At least one of:
>     Forth
>     Prolog
>     Postscript

These teach you about stacks.

> At least one of:
>     Smalltalk
>     Java
>     Objective-C

These teach you about dynamic all-encompassing object-orientation.

> At least one of:
>     Perl
>     Python
>     sh+awk+sed

These teach you about throw-away programming and text processing.

> At least two of:
>     FORTRAN
>     C
>     C++

These are very common languages that a programmer should know at least
a little.  C and Fortran are traditional structural programming
languages.  C++ is an attempt to integrate many different paradigms
together into one language.


Some of the above are in heavy commercial uses, some aren't, but much
can be learnt from each of them that can be applied to other programs
in other languages.

The languages you learn every last detail of should be those that are
commercially used.  But it's very educational to learn the principles
of many others.

.