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Discussion on: How many programming languages do you know?

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erebos-manannan profile image
Erebos Manannán

Definitely depends heavily on the definition of "know", and I guess also "programming language"

Have written something meaningful in? Over 30 different "families" of languages, where I'd say e.g. BASIC includes C-64 BASIC, QBASIC, GW-BASIC, and so on, C++ includes various Borland C++ and such things all the way to C++20.

Write actively and could write something new in without needing to refresh my memory first? More like .. 5? Incl. like BASH and PowerShell.

Mostly these days I write things in Python and Go, but I can unfortunately remember most of JavaScript as well. In the past the list is long and some are very specific things like Quake C and ZZT-OOP that are hard to even remember were a thing.

I try to make a point about learning new languages constantly, since most of the new things are pretty cool and have great new use-cases. Some of the things I plan to learn more about in the future:

  • Zig has a lot of promise to kill off C finally
  • Kotlin might get Java developers to finally migrate, and might provide us a new cool way to make one codebase for both frontend and backend
  • Rust has exciting new thoughts on reliability, but the syntax is pretty hostile to get into - hopefully they'll work on that in the future
  • Nim has a lot of promise to also give us ability for compiling to multiple targets and to build e.g. low level software in much more convenient languages
  • Elm is delivering on a great promise to make frontend programming pleasant again, and the community has a lot of interesting great takes on e.g. animation, web application styling, etc.
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gdotdesign profile image
Szikszai Gusztáv

For some reason I cannot reply to your comment about JavaScript so I'm replying here.

Since you don't like JavaScript that much and interested in Elm I just want to let you know about Mint - the language I created to solve the issues of programming for the frontend. I wrote a series of posts here so you can check those out if you are interested :)

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galoiswannabe profile image
galoisWannaBe

IDK, it feels unfortunate that I remember JavaScript 😂😂😂

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erebos-manannan profile image
Erebos Manannán

Thanks, I'm definitely interested in all alternatives. Actually now that I think about it a bit more Flutter is one of the more promising developments, as you can write an app once and deploy to multiple targets, one of the (currently alpha) targets being web, and you get massive speed benefits on mobile over doing it the other way and deploying web apps on mobile.

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gdotdesign profile image
Szikszai Gusztáv • Edited

I am aware of Flutter and it's intriguing, however I am always sceptical about software that offers compiling the same code to the web and mobile, it is extremely hard to make things look and behave exactly the same on mobile and web without breaking the web.

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

ZZT-OOP

Whoa. Instantly transported to middle school.

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jessekphillips profile image
Jesse Phillips
:greating
?n
#touch @lietux
Hi
#zap greating
#give health 5