What is on Your Mind?

Post what languages (including scripting) you know, why and where you think that language is most usable. Also include libraries in which you're really good at (libusb, gtk, qt, etc).

assembly?
C or C++?
perl or python?
pascal?
bash or csh/tcsh?
opengl?
gtk or qt?
mono?

I have moved this to The Lounge since it's not destined to contribute much to our knowledge base.

It is really enough to "know" the language? I know dozens of languages. But I could currently earn a living writing in Fortran, assembler, C and ksh/bash/sh. I'm pretty good in awk, but I feel that doesn't count since I've never heard of an employer seeking an "awk programmer".

Onr thing to consider... two other languages I know were developed by former employers and not generally available. Do private languages count?

You're right. I only heard a request about awk in an interview for system administration.

Yeah everything counts. I was trying to do this like a poll but then the other users wouldn't be able to choose specifically what languages and why, only the number of languages and that holds no interest I guess.

For my work I need shell / Makefiles, Perl, and regular expressions in particular. Python would be good to know too, but I know Perl well enough that I never really had the incentive to learn yet another language, although I'm planning to fix that. Other than that, I stopped hoarding new languages after I noticed how I was able to get work done in Perl (and finally stopped believing you have to work in a compiled language in order to be taken seriously).

Back at University, I got good marks when I took C, Prolog, and Lisp courses -- oh, and Pascal of course, back then -- , but I could hardly impress anyone with my practical skills in those languages. Emacs Lisp is an environment I enjoy tremendously when I get to dabble with it.

Basic reading comprehension skills in C and C++ never hurt, but I would not know where to start solving a real-world problem, and would be extremely frustrated about the lack of expressive power and standard facilities. I guess a good palette of libraries would ameliorate that a lot, but I don't know any such libraries, and the few I've looked at left a lot to wish for. Ditto in spades for assembly, of course.

Never really seriously tried to tackle Java; somehow I get the impression that people who work in that language are not happy, even though the high amount of reusable libraries looks attractive from a distance.

I have mainly used C and C++, but before that it was Fortran, including various proprietary versions for HPC from Cray and CM. Perhaps the most obscure langauge I used back then was another HPC-specific one called Tao, which had some fun features like being able to define (not just overload) your own operators and syntax. I have also programmed in some assembly langauges which gives you a rather different perspective on things (goto not considered harmful!).

I used to do a lot of Perl and bash and csh and a bit of Python, but not so much now. I dabbled with Ruby too, just out of curiousity. I've never had to write Java, but I ocasionally have to read it.

I think that while it would be unusual to ask specifically for an awk programmer, having reasonable knowledge of a variety of such tools will make you more efficient in your work.

I agree with era that Emacs Lisp is enjoyable, but I haven't done any in ages; I have probably forgotten it all now.

Now there's something I found most interesting. I heard so many people say this, but none of them had a convincing explanation why it's considered harmful. For instance, the Linux Kernel uses it almost exhaustively. Could it be because of design or style? What do you think?

You must be too young to have heard of BASIC (yeah, I used to do that before assembly and C, of course) and Dijkstra's famous article. Spaghetti code used to be the norm.