"How many programming languages are you able to use effortlessly to produce nontrivial programs?"
To be totally honest with myself I had to answer "none," although the answer to "how many programming languages are you able to use with moderate effort..." might have been in the 3 to 5 range, depending on your definition of "moderate." For example, even though I'm "fluent" with Java The Language, I find writing non-trivial programs with it often somewhat painful, usually due to struggles with various aspects of the ecosystem like hibernate, Spring, etc... Or, even though I could crank out a Python script pretty easily, I'm not sure I could do something "non-trivial." (Hell, if I even had to use argparse I'd definitely have to re-read the docs...)
A more objective way to frame the question would be something like "How many languages can you write fizbuzz in under N minutes without using google?" or something along those lines.
Yes, there's as many ways to understand the term "effortlessly" as respondents.
Understanding the question as "how many programming languages I had used in the past to produce nontrivial programs and would likely be able to do this again with little to no refreshing my knowledge", my answer is 8: Pascal, OCaml, C, Java, Haskell, Common Lisp, JS, Clojure (listed roughly in chronological order of learning).
Comments
"How many programming languages are you able to use effortlessly to produce nontrivial programs?"
To be totally honest with myself I had to answer "none," although the answer to "how many programming languages are you able to use with moderate effort..." might have been in the 3 to 5 range, depending on your definition of "moderate." For example, even though I'm "fluent" with Java The Language, I find writing non-trivial programs with it often somewhat painful, usually due to struggles with various aspects of the ecosystem like hibernate, Spring, etc... Or, even though I could crank out a Python script pretty easily, I'm not sure I could do something "non-trivial." (Hell, if I even had to use argparse I'd definitely have to re-read the docs...)
A more objective way to frame the question would be something like "How many languages can you write fizbuzz in under N minutes without using google?" or something along those lines.
Yes, there's as many ways to understand the term "effortlessly" as respondents.
Understanding the question as "how many programming languages I had used in the past to produce nontrivial programs and would likely be able to do this again with little to no refreshing my knowledge", my answer is 8: Pascal, OCaml, C, Java, Haskell, Common Lisp, JS, Clojure (listed roughly in chronological order of learning).