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Discussion on: How many programming languages do you know?

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Austin S. Hemmelgarn

Generically, I'd consider 'knowing' a programming language to be having a sufficient understanding of the syntax and core language semantics to look at an arbitrary snippet of code (with sensible naming) and understand generically what it's doing (possibly with access to documentation about the API's it's using). IOW, you can read and understand at a basic level code in that language without needing to look up stuff like the basic syntax.

By that measure, I 'know':

  • C
  • C++
  • Java
  • POSIX shell script
  • Python
  • Lua
  • Perl (5 only)
  • BASIC (2 dialects)
  • Forth (basics, not specific dialects)
  • JavaScript (ES5 and newer only)
  • Elixir
  • Erlang
  • PowerShell (2.0 and newer)
  • MS-DOS CMD.EXE

And, if you consider them 'programming languages':

  • HTML (4.01, 5, and XHTML 1.1)
  • XML
  • JSON
  • YAML (1.2 and 1.3)
  • CSS (3)
  • SQL (core functionality + 2 dialects at a basic level)
  • Half a dozen network protocols (SMTP, HTTP, etc)
  • Half a dozen configuration file formats