Language Dabbling Considered Wasteful

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/language-dabbling-considered-wasteful

Learning new programming languages is often a waste of time for professional programmers. It may be a fun waste of time (i.e., a hobby), but it’s a waste nonetheless. If you do it for pleasure, then great, but profit is scarce. Pointing this out among good programmers is heresy: even the pragmatic programmers, whose teachings are by and large excellent, suggest we should learn one new programming language every year. That’s rubbish.

The theory is that by learning a new language you "expand your mind" and become "a better programmer". Right. By that kind of argument we should all be eating LSD (don’t). In reality learning a new language is a gritty business in which most of the effort is spent on low-value tasks with poor return on time invested. You need to get to know the libraries, struggle with the environment, find or tune a text editor, look for tools, and so on. Most of the effort has to do with housekeeping chores, which are surely not mind-expanding by anyone’s measure. If you hope to be productive in the new language, things are even bleaker: proficiency has less to do with the language itself than with the myriad technologies you must master to use it effectively.

Even core language learning offers dubious return. How much does it really help to learn a new syntax? How does it expand your mind to learn new operator precedence quirks? Much of what constitutes a language is lexical and syntactical bureaucracy. Worse, you’re learning absolutely nothing about fundamental aspects of computer science. No algorithms, no operating systems, no compiler theory, no math, no AI. If you’re an undergrad, then you should have time to pick up languages on the side while learning all that, of course. But a professional is making a trade-off: what else could you learn with that time? We’re better off studying business, security, usability, architecture, software estimation, and so on, rather than spending time with a different language every year.

If your goal is better programming, you will learn far more from reading high-quality code bases in your current languages than from a new language. Go read top-notch code in the languages you know already; it’ll teach you techniques and style quickly, plus different ways of thinking about problems, with the added bonus that you can actually use what you learn. You can also understand a lot about programming languages in general (issues like typing, scoping, functional vs. imperative) by reading a good book.

There’s another pernicious effect to language hopping: it hurts your momentum. Every time you rely on your current languages you get a little better. Not in a fluffy expand-your-mind way, but in a concrete way. You learn more about your libraries, you set up a new macro in the editor, you have a chance to use that new language feature. Scott Hanselman argues that learning a new language is sharpening your saw, but I see it as neglecting your half-sharpened saw while playing with the dull, new, shiny one. The upfront cost is not the only one either. It’s better to have 3 razor-sharp saws than 8 so-so ones. Each new language you add to your toolbox is making it harder for you to become furiously productive in any given language.

>>11
OO (both class-based and prototype-based)
You speak like those are the only existing approaches to OOP.

You have made a list of mixed shitty languages, that are useful for the ``real world'', but will teach you bad habits, and the so-called mind-openers, said to be useless in ``real world''. I don't see Smalltalk there too.

List of decent, real languages for each paradigm:
Structured: ALGOL. You can hate structured language however you want, but ALGOL was one of the most influent programming languages, and was pretty nice too. I really can't see how C and derivates could ruin it so much.

OOP (Prototypes): Io. Why not JS? JavaScript is an impure piece of shit. Its potential got completely destroyed by the ``Java'' part of its name, even if it has nothing to do with it. So, not only you have to deal with retarded coercion rules, but also need to deal with a bastardized function syntax to define objects. Io is a pure, homoiconic prototype-based OOP language, so it's the best way to learn this paradigm.

OOP (Message-passing): Smalltalk, then Scheme. Objective C and Ruby suck. If you want to be hip and cool, programming is not about being cool, and you should find another hobby. Many think that Smalltalk is OOP done right, and it's one of the three languages I always raccomend (the others being Lisp and Forth). Why Scheme? Because writing a simple message-passing OOP system in it is just one page of code, and a perfect way to understand what's going when you pass a message to an object.

OOP (Multi-dispatching): CLOS-like object systems. No need to say more. Read TinyCLOS' source code.

OOP (Class-based): One of the worst approaches to object-orientation. There's no class-based language that does not suck, as far as I know. Learn some C#, if you need to do some real world work. If you really need it.

Lisp (Lisp): Lisp/Scheme. Learning them will make you a better programmer, even if you'll never actually use them. Most concepts in modern high-level programming languages come from Lisps. Read SICP.

Functional (impure, strict): Scheme. I'm not a fan of Ocaml, and its syntax is pretty horrible too. Scheme is decent at being functional, and its tiny core will make you spend more time on thinking how abstract the problem than chaining functions.

Functional (pure, lazy): Haskell/Clean. They are similiar, but Haskell has nomads. They are not as scary as you may think, when you'll understand them you'll realize how much a stupid mental masturbation they are. It's still good to know them. Idiomatic Haskell code tends to be point-free, teaching you how to compose functions and split a problem in many smaller problems. The forced immutability will show you how overrated is mutable state.

Stack-based: Forth.

Low-level: Your architecture's assembly language, Forth. Forth is the best low-level programming language, and it's complementary to Lisp. It really does give the programmer the full control over the machine and the language. It's extensible assembly. If you want to learn it, jonesforth is a good start, but you'll need basic knowledge of x86 assembly, so read the Intel manuals first.

Congratulations, you're now a decent programmer.