One True Language
As seen in Mordor: the One True Coding Language! Spend a few years on an IRC channel, and experience the stream of “what’s the best language to code with?” questions and resulting hilarity. Ugh.
- Looking for a job? Pick a language used in the field or company that interests you.
- Unix systems administration? Learn shell scripting, and try out Perl, Python, or Ruby, and see what you still use five years from now (if anything).
- Experimenting? Pick something at random. Or at least from a different family of programming: functional versus object oriented and so forth.
- This language sucks! Patches welcome, or see above.
For the record, I use Perl, plus a dash of Unix shell scripting. Perl suits me perfectly: great for text processing, systems administration, and other random tasks. Huge amounts of code available in CPAN. No need to learn another language for my job (gainful computer entropy reduction), and other projects more important right now.
Next week: the One True Filesystem Layout!