What are the most important programming languages to know for concepts? [closed]

Answer 1

A good short list:

1. C for the machine concepts
2. Haskell for functional programming
3. Smalltalk (or maybe Ruby or Simula-67) for object-oriented programming
4. Prolog for logic programming
5. Icon for backtracking and mind-blowing string processing
6. Bourne shell for Unix scripting

Might also include

7. Scheme for macros
8. Awk or Perl or ... for regular expressions
9. FORTH for tiny bootstrapping postfix wonderfulness :-)

Answer 2

If you want to understand computers and the underlying hardware, C is the single most important language, commonly said to be the lingua franca of computers. The Stackoverflow podcast tends to cover this at least once a week.

There seem to be enough answers on this, so I'll just leave it at that.

Answer 3

Having a scan through the answers so far I'm surprised I've not seen any mention of actionscript.

I think if you learn some C/C++, then some Java then that should prepare you for pretty much all of the decent languages out there. I prefer to see my code in action and I find Actionscript 3 (not 2 or 1) along with Flex (which is MXML) great for quickly demoing visual concepts.

So C & Java helps to learn the syntax of the majority of languages. Actionscript 3 (very similar to java syntax) & MXML for being able to express you code visually very quickly.

Answer 4

Look for a set of different programming languages:

• C++ / C# / Java etc.
• C / Assembler
• Python, Ruby, Lua, Perl etc.
• sh, awk, sed, regular expressions
• Prolog (or similar)
• Haskell / Lisp etc.

It doesn't really matter which ones you choose, but that you choose one from each "category".

Answer 5

Must know:

1) C (system programming, understanding of machine architecture)

2) Perl or Python or Ruby (practical day-to-day tasks)

3) Java or C# or C++ (OOP, and quite important to get a job these days)

Really important:

1) Haskell or ML (functional programming; changes the way you think)

2) Lisp or Scheme (power of macros)

Nice additionals:

1) Forth (very low-level, explicit stack operation + joy to write your own interpreter)

2) Assembly languages (know how your CPU works)

3) Erlang (parallel processing)

4) Prolog (logic programming)

5) Smalltalk (true OOP and true interactive developent)

Answer 6

Pascal or Basic for start and to master basics of procedural programming.

At school we learned Haskel for functional programming.

And then one should try assembler or C for getting deep and Java for OOP.

A have no arguments for this - that's only my taste and what I tried.