Does it hurt to learn bits of many programming languages?

Question

I started my programming career with BASIC, during 9th grade. I learned a bit of BASIC by writing simple programs to add, subtract and to print. Then I went to the university and took Computer Information and Systems Engineering. In the first year I was taught C, and I have good command over it.

Next I learned C++ in the second year. It just taught me some knowledge of OOP. Now I am doing PHP (along with HTML). I have not mastered C++, BASIC or PHP. I am now planning to move to mobile development. But I feel that I have not covered everything in the languages I learned.

Does it really matter?

Answer 1

We're all just learning bits of programming languages. I would only consider the language implementers to be those who are a 10 out of 10 in the knowledge of a language.

Learning multiple languages, and paradigms, is the only way to develop a "taste" for what you like and don't like. If you only learned one language, you wouldn't even be able to really decide whether you even like it or not.

You're actually doing it the correct way. You will be able to reuse the most important fundamentals you learn in each while getting exposure to different syntax, libraries, and frameworks.

Answer 2

If you're still in university, it shouldn't matter yet that you don't feel you've covered everything in any of the languages you know. Understanding the common fundamental theories behind these languages is much more important. Once you understand the basics, you can learn the details of other languages when you need them.

Answer 3

I believe that the most important in programming is to understand the different paradigms.

In your question, you mentioned Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). If you mastered this topic, you should be able to explain it using only pseudo-code and essentially some graphical modelling representation (such as UML class diagrams).

Whether you decide to use Java, C++ or C# (...) is up to you or to the company you work for, but what is really important is to understand/recognize the different problems and decide the best model to solve them. A very important way to solve problems in programming is to use the design patterns which you can discover in this reference book.

As for embedded languages, I believe the important thing is to understand the different problems associated with such technologies.

In a metaphoric way, I'd compare this to writing a good scientific book; what is important is the theory you expose, the problems you manage to solve, and so on. Whether you write the book in English, in French or in Japanese is not that important in the end.

That said, it is also important to know the specifics of a particular language if you want to specialize in that technology in order to exploit it very efficiently.

Answer 4

In my opinion, there's little point in changing language very frequently. You'll never actually grasp any of them. Especially some like C++, where some people spend a decade writing the language and still have their code look like C.

If you can't write best practices in a language, then don't move on, IMO. That means that covering more than a couple will take many years, if not decades.

Answer 5

I think it won't hurt to learn a bit of many different languages, but at the same time you should learn at least one or two in depth.

Answer 6

it's good to study languages from different programming paradigms at least! Procedural, declarative, functional, object-oriented, prototypical, and dynamic language - each class of programming offers its own bit of insight as to how to organize and solve a problem. Eventually you discover one or more paradigms that you're most productive and happy with, and use it.

Answer 7

I've used many languages during my career, like AMOS Basic, Java, C++, PHP, VB6, Delphi etc. Today I use C#, JavaScript, Ruby and some Clojure at work, and I've also played with Pyhton, Erlang, Common Lisp and Scheme.

But this fall I wanted to make a special x-mas calendar for my blog, and decided to familiarize myself with and solve a particular problem in 24 additional languages. This was a great experience, I learned a lot, and I highly recommend doing this once you have some programming experience.

My answer to you is this: Learn a couple of languages really well (they should be quite different), but make sure you sample and familiarize yourself with many.

Today it's important to know both OOP and FP (functional programming) well, and you should also be comfortable in both a very static and a very dynamic language.

PS: My blog is in Norwegian, but if you'd like to see the list of languages I covered you can have a look here.

Answer 8

I learn what I need to learn in a particular language when I need to learn something new. The "trigger" that tells me I need to delve deeper into a language is that a particular bit of code looks ugly or clumsy, appears unmaintainable or is difficult to test or comment. Often these triggers point to my lack of knowledge of a particular programming idiom, style, data structure and so on.

Answer 9

Learning multiple programming languages is good practice and is necessary nowadays; as many times you can't always use your language of choice for everything.

The benefits of seeing how other languages do things will help you as a programmer; even if occassionally when you are jumping around you make syntactical mistakes (e.g., is checking for inequality !=, ~= or <>). You should be careful though to learn more than just the syntax of a language, but best practices within a language as well as just general good software engineering skills. Stuff if you learned C and then learned C++ you should make sure when you are writing C++ code that it is in the style of C++ code (rather than just C with a few new keywords. That is you have multiple classes/objects, prefer references/smart pointers over raw pointers, etc.

Answer 10

Definitely not. Of course you also want to make sure you are learning different styles of languages. Learning both C# and Java will not expand your mind in any major way, but learning Java and Haskell will.

Check out the Book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, which will walk you through an intro to Ruby, IO, Scala, Erlang, Prolog, Clojure and Haskell. IF you enjoy languages you will love that book.

Answer 11

Well, C and C++ won't do you any harm in mobile programming. You can use both with Cocoa Touch or the Android NDK, and sometimes you need to for performance. Also, sometimes you want to because you want to write code that runs on several platforms. In that case, assuming you're not just using a third-party framework, you can write your app in C/C++, and compile in platform-specific wrappers for required native elements (for example, the only way to get an OpenGL context on iPhone is by using the native CAEAGLLayer class).

So it's like the more tools you have in the drawer, the more options you have for getting the job done. You'll find you have a preference for certain ones as you specialize in various kinds of tasks. If you only do UI stuff, C might not be your all-time favorite. I would worry more about the kinds of things I wanted to get done, and then learn any tool I needed to do them.

Answer 12

It's actually about as useful as learning a little bit of French, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese while never knowing any one of them well.

Answer 13

On the contrary, I think it hurts when I don't/am not able to learn a new programming language. It may be because of the lack of time or some other reasons. As far as I see, programmers/software developers are in love of challenging the languages, putting better things/products, and when you see that you are doing same thing always, you don't feel good. So you want a new challenge, a new language, something new to learn and put more products by it.

So I think it gives me excitement to follow new languages, new libraries, new approaches, new technologies. But I don't have time to get all of them, and people may not be able to go enough deep always. So it hurts not to learn more; but doesn't not hurt to learn more.