On Feb 13, 2008 10:40 AM, J. Cooper <nefigah / gmail.com> wrote:
> As a new programmer (still in school), I'm curious as to the world of
> scripting languages and their roles. I am learning Ruby (played a bit
> with Rails a year ago, but more recently have been using it for my own
> scripting projects), but I have zero experience with Perl and Python,
> which seem to be pretty household names and thus I feel out of the loop.
>
> I guess what I'm asking is: assuming I become a proficient Rubyist, is
> there a reason to learn Perl or Python (beyond someone handing me a pile
> of code in one of those languages and telling me to maintain it)?

There's always a reason to learn more languages - they expand the way
you think.  For this I would, however, think it better to learn a
different kind of language rather than Perl/Python.  I personally
think you'll be a better programmer for knowing C and assembly
programming, as that gives you some idea of how things work at a lower
level - closer to the hardware.

I also think that learning a functional language (ML, Haskell) will be
helpful - teaching you new ways to think.  And SQL is always useful
(though you'd be better off also learning the underlying model, as SQL
is a poor implementation).

Eivind.