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As someone said, there are many paradigms. I like everything done by pragmatic programmer, but there is a book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks that gives a good survey of what's out there.

I'll have to take a look at that book!!

Thanks for your input!

PHEW! The first 40% of my career was dominated by C/C++. This didn't mean I didn't program in anything else (just for business, by 1997 I'd programmed in C, C++, Pascal, 8086 assembly language, Dos batch, Rexx for OS/2, and SQL, and Microsoft Basic in its several dialects before VB6 and Office 97).

Now, I rarely if ever write anything in C++, and only slightly more frequently in pure C. It's all either VB.NET or C# on the server, Javascript (with some VBScript on some legacy ASP apps) in web browsers, and lots of SQL.

SQL has become the standard database query language. Any developer working with commercial databases will eventually wish they knew SQL. It's not new, though.

I strongly recommend giving Javascript some time and thought. Despite its syntactic similarities, it is NOT much like C/C++. The Code Project's Daily News recently referred to a Java JVM with compiler and decompiler that had been written in Javascript - this ring a bell with the way C was pitched to us back in the distant past? Yet Javascript is more like Lisp in the way you can instantly create and redefine classes and instances at run-time. It's the base language for most of the client frameworks on the web, making it an essential stop if you plan to play with web programming. It's not new, but it is the bricks from which much shiny new stuff is being made.

Java, or rather the Java Virtual Machine, is the current "universal language." The Java Virtual Machine insures that Java code will run identically on an 80386 relic or an MVS mainframe and everything in between, including a host of smart devices that live in your home and car. Think of how you would build C/C++ for folks who you never want to bother with what's actually inside their data (you know, like BITS) and that's Java. C# on the .NET environment is similar, but much less portable.

Go and Dart seem to be the contenders for a new system language to do what C once did. Dr. Dobb's Journal has some interesting articles about these.

I'll skip the functional languages, except to say that if you've never played with Lisp, they will change your world. Any of them will do this, so I suggest you try any of them. It will open your mind to new ways of thinking about computation.

That should do for starters Cool | :cool:

"Seize the day" - Horace

"It's not what he doesn't know that scares me; it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so!" - Will Rogers, said by him about Herbert Hoover

Wow!! Thanks for your insight!! Gives much food for thought!! I guess I have three more languages to look at:Go, Dart, and Javascript...

Thanks again!!

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