• marcos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    My undergrad officially required Pascal, C, C++, Java, PHP, Prolog, Lisp, x86 and MIPS assembly. You couldn’t work around those. There was also Tiger, VHDL, and Bash that were required, but you would probably not count as languages. (I’m certainly forgetting some stuff too.)

    There was a virtual certainty you’d need some more languages, but not everybody would need the same ones.

    • theneverfox@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      Damn… That list sounds terrifying. I’m working on a legacy code base in VB (although I finally have time to try out this c# converter to start the slow march out of depreciation), and 8 months later I still feel gross with VB. I’m pretty sure VB is uniquely horrible because of the inconsistency. .

      I’ve heard good things about pascal and lisp… But lisp syntax also makes me irrationally uncomfortable

      I did prolog as well in an elective, that was a weird and interesting language. It’s not very practical, but it was fun. Plus graph theory is one of the weird maths that pops up everywhere, maybe one day I’ll find an excuse to try to use it for something

      So it sounds like you had even more than me, I’m now wondering why even my relatively young co-workers all seemed to specialize so hard straight out of school

      What did you end up working in? Did you specialize, or keep up with the language juggling?

      • marcos@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Picking up languages is quite easy, you just have to learn it. Turns out nowadays I mostly work with SQL (it’s on the required list too, I just forgot about it) and C#. Learning new paradigms is harder, but there aren’t that many of those.

        I’m now wondering why even my relatively young co-workers all seemed to specialize so hard straight out of school

        That’s imposed by the job market, not natural thing to exist. In fact, it’s very much unnatural.