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Programming goes beyond language and syntax.
Anyone who can program say, C#, VB and SQL should know enough to pick up almost any other language out there in a couple of hours.
Anyone who has written C# should be able to pick up JAVA almost immediately, and vice-versa - in fact most C based languages should fall in very quickly.
Anyone who knows VB, also automatically knows most flavours of BASIC, and the VB derivations (VB6.0, VBA, VB Script, VB.NET etc)
I prefer not to define programming knowledge by the number of programming languages known, but rather the various types and specialties of languages, such as RAD, managed, object-oriented, scripting, query (eg PL/SQL, SQL), markup, procedural, mathematical/functional (eg F#), graphical (eg HLSL, OpenGL, LOGO) etc.
Obviously to consider yourself a master at a particular language you need experience with it's specific peculiarities (eg, users of C# will probably trip up on pointers, macros and headers if they move to C++) but the broader part of any programming knowledge and experience transcends language and syntax.
Also, I agree that while you might put XML and HTML down on your CV, they are markup languages, not programming languages (any logic implemented by a HTML page is written in VBS or Java Script)
You could probably draw a long bow and consider XSL a type of programming language as it has conditional statements, iterators and flow control, but you couldn't build a mail client with it or use it to organize your cd collection.
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How is it that we have so many 'developers' claiming to know HTML, XML (amongst others) as programming languages?
Neither of these is anything of the sort!
Perhaps some folk would benefit from closely (re?)reading this[^]
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I already know three, but I'd rather answer "I simply haven't seen another language I want to learn". Because 95% of languages other than C[++] are totally useless crap. in another thousand years we'll be machines or gods█
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When you started (like I did) with a C64 you usually know BASIC and 6510 Assembler. At school we had Turbo Pascal. During my apprenticeship as skilled worker in electronics we used 8085 Assembler and TP again. Doing Perl then was my own Idea. When studying CS I used C++, Java, C, SQL. I should have learned haskell, matlab and x86 Ass as well, but I don't remember much about that. First contact with .net happened when working for two years for the chair of automatition (porting from VBS to VB.net).
Now I earn my money with C#, SQL and a bit of javascript. My co-worker have a likewise education, so I think most professional developers are fluent in at least 5 languages.
Learning new languages is exciting (I'm throgh the ruby chapter of 7 languages in 7 weeks) and you learn about new concepts. They open your mind, even if you don't get fluent in those languages.
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There are limits to the utility of doing anything better if you are already great. To ask why somebody doesn't do more of something presumes that it would be significantly beneficial, which it may not be.
I personally have a working knowledge of: JavaScript, C#, VB.NET, VB6, C++, XSLT, HTML, XAML, LINQ, QuickBasic, SQL, Regular Expressions, and ASP.NET (Web Forms and MVC). I know more than enough, and will learn more as required.
Rather than spend my time learning yet another programming language, I am currently spending my free time: exercising, watching Lost, working on a personal project, and learning French. Spending several years of my life learning as much about programming as I could was very fruitful, but now I know enough that I want to spend most of my free time doing other things.
Sometimes you need to stop running, and just enjoy the scenery.
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What?
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when there is plenty to learn about the languages I already use?
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