• @okamiueru
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    71 month ago

    I find this question very interesting. What does it mean to “know” a programming language. They map to certain paradigms for how to solve problems, in various degrees, with different tradeoffs there for surrounding tooling, libs, and what not.

    A bunch of the most familiar ones are procedural with different sprinkles on top, and they pretty much do the same things when it comes to the “language” side. So, “knowing” one, or another, IMO, has little to do with the syntax, parsing and keywords, and is much more if you have suffered through cryptic compile errors, figured out good debugging tooling, etc.

    Which is to say, if we compare these two list

    • C++, Haskell, Prolog
    • C++, Java, Python, Rust, Kotlin, Objective-C, Dart, etc

    I’d consider the first one much more impressive in terms of diversity in “knowing programming languages”. And, I say that as someone belonging squarely in the latter.