Programming Languages Worth Learning

12 December 2024

A programming language that doesn't change the way you think is not worth learning.

- Alan Perlis, "Epigrams in Programming"

What are programming languages worth learning, then? I've been thinking a little bit about this, lately, and I think I have found a list (from lower level to higher level, and then somewhat circling back):

• Assembly: Shows you the lowest level of communication with a computer
• C: Shows you how to think in terms of loops and if conditions
• Python: Shows you how to use a higher-level, scripting, dynamic language
• Java: Shows you object orientation, garbage collection, and a VM runtime
• Go: Shows you concurrency using goroutines
• Erlang: Shows you resiliency on distributed systems
• Scheme: Shows you about Lisp, which shows you first-class functions, code-as-data, recursion, etc, etc, etc...
• Haskell: Shows you pure functional programming
• Rust: Shows you ownership, lifetimes, and somehow circles back to C

Some obvious languages are left out. You don't need to learn C++ if you already learned C, Java, and Rust; you don't need C# if you have Java; you don't need Perl or Ruby if you have Python; you don't need Ada or D if you have Rust.

Other languages (Prolog and Forth come to mind) I don't know enough about to include them in the list. Will do.

Please note that I'm also leaving out languages that I like: Clojure and Racket because of Scheme, Scala and Kotlin because of Java, Elixir because of Erlang.

Thoughts?

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