How many programming languages do you know? Or rather, how many programming languages do you know how to program in? How many do you think you need?
Some 12 years ago, while I was still writing a monthly magazine column for a computer publication, I made a conscious decision to concentrate on just one programming language, and documented the reasons in one of my columns. Basically, it seemed at the time that it was simply too much to learn many programming languages and become decent, or at least good enough, in all of them to make it worthwhile.
That could be a valid point even today, but there was another, more subtle point, which I completely missed at the time: there were not that many viable alternatives anyway. Languages like Python and Ruby were not very mature back then, JavaScript was in its infancy, C# or Scala did not even exist, and Haskell was an even more of a research language than it still is now.
For me it was an easy task to leave behind C++ (thank goodness) and even C, and just concentrate on Java. Yes, that was “the one true language” for me at the time. It turned out to be a fairly good choice, at least until now.
Continue reading, and find out how the landscape has changed...