[COFF] What languges would you like to learn?

[lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 11:28:12AM -0500, Toby Thain wrote:
> On 2019-12-23 6:27 p.m., Nemo Nusquam wrote:
> > A recent thread makes me wonder which languages would people like to
> > learn??? (I confess to trying, as Dave does, but time prevents anything
> > more that learing syntax and writing toy programmes.?? One must write
> > something substantial -- not synonomous with large -- to really learn a
> > language.)
> > 
> > Erlang, Smalltalk, Prolog, Haskell, and Scheme come to mind...
> 
> You have GREAT taste, and that covers the major paradigms.

As a systems guy who likes to get all the perf he can out of the machine,
those are not what I'd reach for 1st, 2nd, or 3rd.  I still like C, it's
what I reach for first.  Go might be second.

For scripting I designed http://little-lang.org which looks a lot like
interpreted C with a bunch of neat extensions (ever wanted strings in
your switch() statement?  How about regexps?).  I

The listed languages are what a very small set of programmers passionately
love but they never go anywhere because the rank and file programmers don't
get it.  I can think of lots of examples where some smart dude pushed 
lisp in a company and it either never went anywhere or it died when the
dude left.

There is a lot to be said for programming in the most simple way possible,
we had a saying at my company "Write code so it is the most readable.
Because 6 months from now you'll not remember it, it will be like reading
someone else's code".

Code is write once, read many.  Optimize for that.