Number of languages known [was Re: Python is readable] - somewhat OT

[Steve Howell]

On Mar 22, 6:11 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt... at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 06:14:46 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > In any case, though, I agree that there's a lot of people professionally
> > writing code who would know about the 3-4 that you say. I'm just not
> > sure that they're any good at coding, even in those few languages. All
> > the best people I've ever known have had experience with quite a lot of
> > languages.
>
> I dare say that experience with many languages is a good thing, but it's
> not a prerequisite for mastery of a single language.
>
> In any case, I'm not talking about the best developers. I'm talking about
> the typical developer, who by definition is just average. They probably
> know reasonably well one to three of the half dozen most popular
> languages (VB, Java, C, C+, Javascript, PHP, Perl?) plus regexes and SQL,
> and are unlikely to know any of Prolog, Lisp, Haskell, Hypertalk,
> Mercury, Cobra, Smalltalk, Ada, APL, Emerald, Inform, Forth, ...

I love how you can rattle off 20 or so languages, just off the top of
your head, and not even mention Ruby. ;)

(Although Perl was close enough.)