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

Answer 1

C for understanding how the most other language(-implementations) and operation systems are implemented

Answer 2

It is not the languages rather the paradigms you should know:

• procedural (like C, Pascal)
• object-oriented (like Java, C++, Smalltalk)
• functional (like Lisp, ML, Scala)

If you understood one of these paradigms in one language, it is easy to learn another language in the same paradigm. And there are even more fields specially supported by languages that are important to understand:

• parallelism (in Erlang or Scala)
• declarative templates (e.g. in C++ or Prolog)
• dynamic languages (e.g. JavaScript)

At at last you should always know what goes on under the hoods, so you better have a look at assembler.

Answer 3

This is a good question. I know a lot of people, myself included, get stuck in a rut where we are just churning out code like one would churn out burgers at a McDonald's. Coding becomes too mechanical—we understand how to get things done, but often times we forget why these things get done behind the scenes.

In my world it's been C++/C/ObjectiveC that have taught me the most, even though I write C# every day at work.

For the most part, learning C++ has helped me learn about memory management and how the various objects are stored in memory, etc.—the actual science of programming. What really opened my eyes was the Programming Paradigms class offered at Standford that you can get off of iTunes and I think YouTube.

Answer 4

Limbo - a programming language with concurrency and channels, what C should have evolved into. ( see also D, another C successor )

No-one else seems to be mentioning any declarative languages, so here are a few:

Prolog - a declarative language for logic programming

Modelica - a declarative OO language for modelling systems.

XSLT - a declarative language for transforming XML.

For parallelism, you don't get much wider than shader language, and the related OpenCL - typically 512 processors in parallel on a high-end desktop, rather than Erlang's 4 processors in parallel ( though with many scheduled processes ).

Answer 5

Well. I'd say learn C and javascript. They are most widely used languages.

You might want to learn Java/some .Net language and/or python/ruby: they're more convenient, tho.

This have the advantage that all those languages are reasonably well designed. For example, don't learn PHP or C++ because they're a mess. They're used widely, you might want to learn them one day, but they can seriously mess with your mind.

Answer 6

You already mentioned two, here are a few more:

• Java: Java is a good example of OOP 'cause you HAVE to use oop, and it's designed from the ground up to be an OOP language.
• BASIC: Although obsolete, it's a good example of procedural languages and it has a very easy syntax.