tazman at 2014-01-21T03:20:54Z
Hacker questions
I just posted a long-winded babbling speculation about programming language somewhere else...sort of stream of conscious meandering about what little I know, and stuff I wonder about, prompted by my random perusal of some ruby tutorials this evening.To be more succinct here, I'm going to ask a few simple questions:
What is your favoured programming language? Why?
Is that language (at least, in your mind) more suited to certain tasks than other languages? Why?
Do you like some other language, maybe for other purposes?
How many programming languages do you use regularly and/or with skill?
Do you think it's better to focus on learning one language and really try to master it before learning others? Or is learning a diversity of languages more likely to make a better hacker?
#hacking #tcl #perl #python #lua #lisp #ruby #java #php #bash #haskell
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Good questions. I wish I could answer them :-)
What is your favoured programming language? Why?
"Favoured"? I don't have a favorite. "Most exciting at the moment?" Rust, because it's something difficult
Is that language (at least, in your mind) more suited to certain tasks than other languages? Why?
Of course. Building a Website in Rust would be an exercise in frustration, but building a kernel in JavaScript an exercise in the not possible.
Do you like some other language, maybe for other purposes?
Many
How many programming languages do you use regularly and/or with skill?
At least 5+
Do you think it's better to focus on learning one language and really try to master it before learning others? Or is learning a diversity of languages more likely to make a better hacker?
Rust won't teach you the same things that Scheme will. Or Haskell.
At the higher level end of things, learning a language is a couple of days affair (though it might take you some time to grasp some of the underlying subtleties and strokes of genius), while at the lower level end of things learning the subtleties of C can take years, and the true extent of C++ many more.
(Rust, for the record, is like C with some of the subtleties removed (Much less undefined behavior), with the new thing to be learned how to annotate lifetimes correctly (which the compiler will beat into you by force))
"Favoured"? I don't have a favorite. "Most exciting at the moment?" Rust, because it's something difficult
Is that language (at least, in your mind) more suited to certain tasks than other languages? Why?
Of course. Building a Website in Rust would be an exercise in frustration, but building a kernel in JavaScript an exercise in the not possible.
Do you like some other language, maybe for other purposes?
Many
How many programming languages do you use regularly and/or with skill?
At least 5+
Do you think it's better to focus on learning one language and really try to master it before learning others? Or is learning a diversity of languages more likely to make a better hacker?
Rust won't teach you the same things that Scheme will. Or Haskell.
At the higher level end of things, learning a language is a couple of days affair (though it might take you some time to grasp some of the underlying subtleties and strokes of genius), while at the lower level end of things learning the subtleties of C can take years, and the true extent of C++ many more.
(Rust, for the record, is like C with some of the subtleties removed (Much less undefined behavior), with the new thing to be learned how to annotate lifetimes correctly (which the compiler will beat into you by force))
I use C, because I like wasting hours debugging memory allocation problems and solving mysterious segmentation faults.