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Comment on Poll: How many programming languages do you command fluently?

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Effortlessly? Hmmm... 0, depending on exactly how you define "effortlessly". But if I understand the spirit of the question correctly, I'd say there are 4 or 5 languages I can be productive in without essentially having to learn the language and associated libraries from scratch. Offhand, I'd offer up C, C++, Java, Groovy and Javascript as languages I'm at least moderately competent in. I could probably still write Python without too much trouble with a couple of days to knock the rust off.

All of that said, if you asked me to write a non-trivial program starting today, and I had to optimize for productivity, I'd pick Groovy.

C, C++, Java, Groovy and Javascript as languages I'm at least moderately competent in

When I had only used this subset of languages, I found Groovy the most productive. But when I tried out others afterwards, I found...

1. Clojure and Haskell seemed to be top of the pyramid. Between them, they have the most functionality you could ever hope to get out of any two chosen languages.

2. Ruby and Groovy did the same things, tho Ruby came first. Nowadays I'd call Groovy a JVM-based dialect of Ruby, but with different lexical tokens. Unless you're using it with Grails, why not just use the more popular one?

heh, totally forget that I once knew Groovy, thanks for the reminder.

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