Hi guys, nevero here !!
So, right now at school I’m doing, among other things, a class on web development. Β It’s actually the second time I’m doing it since I failed it the first time… oups. Anyway, the first time I did it the teacher was hellbent on making use learn this new functional language for web, Scala. I’m not even going to go into what Scala is…( <hate> ) Now, the same teacher decided he found a better language for us to learn: Haskell. While I agree with him that Haskell is better than Scala, like WAY WAY better, I keep wondering: “Is their too many languages in my life right now?”
Now let’s see, since I started my degree in 2008 (oh God I should really finish it soon right?) I’ve learned nearly a dozen language: C++, Java, Objective-C, Scala, Haskell, php, Javascript, C#, perl, ruby, matlab and promela. Now of course I don’t consider myself an expert in any of those (maybe C++…) since I use most of them, well never.
But, yeah there was a “but” coming, it’s still good to learn different languages, it gives you perspective on different way to do things. Still, I wish there was less languages and more standards on the good ones. I mean a lot of languages out there offer different interesting things, but you can almost do anything with a single language. Granted it might be hard, but still, it’s doable. It’s just really hard for me to keep switching language like this. Here an example of something that happened to me yesterday: I was doing some tutorial on haskell, and I started writing C code. Of course the code was not compiling, but it took me around 10 minutes to realize that I was using the wrong language. Ok I know, it sounds noob-ish of me… agreed. But in my defense, see for yourself how hard it can be to keep track of two really different languages:
this one is C++:

and this one is Haskell.

These two program do exactly the same thing, which is sum a number from 1 to n. At first glance, the two samples being so different, you might not realize it, but they really do the same thing. So, if you’re doing Haskell, C++, Javascript, … in the same day, you can understand it can become very frustrating!
Well, thanks for reading I really had to share this π
-nevero