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Trevor Pearson wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:49E65E0B.4020000@haven.demon.co.uk" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Dave Murphy wrote:
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<pre wrap="">On Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:34:38 +0100
Trevor Pearson <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:trevor@haven.demon.co.uk"><trevor@haven.demon.co.uk></a> wrote:
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<pre wrap="">Is there really a need for all these languages ? could we just settle
for having a couple, you know, one for quick scripts, one for longer and
more complicated scripts and a heavy-duty compiled behemoth for the
'big' jobs?
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<pre wrap="">...but learning one or two languages to the point of being able to be
productive quickly and easily when required (i.e. when someone's paying
you) is better that trying everything out for the sake of it. From that
perspective Perl, Python and Ruby win out over Erlang, Lisp etc.
(unless, of course, you're specialising in a field where those
languages are prevalent - in web work they're not)
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<pre wrap=""><!---->I'm not being too serious there, but since you mention it, there are
good reasons to at least be familiar with a variety of languages. In my
case most of the work is on existing systems, some written in java
others in perl, some '.net' code and shell scripts. True enough
specialisation is key to being productive, efficient and effective.
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<tt>I also believe a knowledge of other languages outside what you need
is a good thing.<br>
Recently I've seen a lot of people talking about things the Smalltalk
people learned<br>
over 20 years ago that us in the newer dynamic languages are only just
'discovering'.<br>
<br>
I'm not saying you need to become a pro in these languages to get
anything out of them.<br>
But the knowledge can sure help when it comes to solving complicated
problems!<br>
<br>
At $dayjob I'm dealing with a custom binary protocol of ours,
communicating with remote<br>
devices using SMS/GPRS, potentially having to deal with millions of
'messages' per day.<br>
Erlang has some funky binary pattern matching that could be very useful
to me!<br>
It's also kinda build for 'server' code (for lack of a better way of
expressing what I mean :p)<br>
But as is always the case, time is my enemy! *sob* =)<br>
<br>
Luke<br>
</tt>
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