Can you Improve your programming skills by learning other language paradigms?

Question

If so, can you tell me how learning a new paradigm changed your approach for solving programming problems even if the problem is in another paradigm/language/technology?

I will really appreciated If you can tell me in a specific manner, how your X (ie: JAVA/C#/C++) programming skills improved by learning Y (ie: Scheme/Prolog/Lisp).

Also, what paradigms do you suggest helps the most to become a good programmer?

My experiences are only structured - OOP, imperative - procedural, and into some extent template meta-programming, but my goal is not to learn another language, but rather to learn different approaches for solving problems.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I try to learn at least 1-2 new languages every year. The most I gained was from learning a functional language (F#) which changed the way I look at solving problems - I=now I try to tell the machine what to do instead of how to do it, especially in C# where I use Linq heavily and immutable objects now that I know the benefits of using them. I also use higher order functions quite a lot (methods as parameters) an my coding style has changed (improved) as a result.

Answer 2

Absolutely. Every programming language you learn will have a different way of doing certain things. Some things will drive you crazy, some things you'll love and other things will slowly grow on you.

Its never a waste of time to learn at least the basics of a new language.

Answer 3

Ok, here's an example I've encountered.

I've learned a relatively old language (VB6) for a project on some old code we had.
The language is very windows-oriented but there aren't as much high-level powerful classes like we have in .Net framework.

I had to do some picture manipulations, and that introduced me to the windows API functions for the picture manipulations.

After I've learned that it gave me a better understanding of .Net's GDI Classes. And the understanding that sometimes using windows API will be much faster (less function wrapping).

So that's to show that even when you learn old code, you can still learn and get another perspective.