Every programmer knows there is one true programming language

[zridling]

Brian Hayes talks about how we've created one programming language per week since FORTRAN. Holy cow.
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If you want to be the complete polyglot programmer, you also have quite a challenge ahead of you, learning all the ways to say:

                      printf("hello, world\n") ;

(This one is in C.) A catalog maintained by Bill Kinnersley of the University of Kansas lists about 2,500 programming languages. Another survey, compiled by Diarmuid Piggott, puts the total even higher, at more than 8,500. And keep in mind that whereas human languages have had millennia to evolve and diversify, all the computer languages have sprung up in just 50 years. Even by the more-conservative standards of the Kinnersley count, that means we've been inventing one language a week, on average, ever since Fortran.

[zridling]

If you ask me, it all went to hell after FORTRAN. (That was the only language I took courses in.) But that doesn't make me a bad person. Just a stupid one.

[40hz]

^Felt the same way about Modula-3.  Especially the TopSpeed version.

Although in all fairness, Python is a pretty efficient dev lang too.

[Mark0]

I would say that green would have been a better choice for Python's color! 

[fenixproductions]

It would be interesting to see this chart updated.

[bscott]

If you want to be the complete polyglot programmer...

How easily can people here switch between languages/frameworks.

I find myself using C, C++, C#, PHP, Python, Javascript at different times. If I have been working in say C++ and then need to do some work in Python it takes me a while to switch out of C++ mode and get up to speed in Python mode.

Is this just a shortcoming that I have or do others have a similar difficulty quickly switching their focus?

[Renegade]

Is this just a shortcoming that I have or do others have a similar difficulty quickly switching their focus?

-bscott (January 31, 2011, 02:32 AM)

No, it's not just you. Switching gears is time consuming.

I do a lot of different things, and it can take me several days to get "in the zone".

It's generally very easy for me to switch into localization mode, but switching into different programming modes is rough sometimes.