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What languages should a person learn to be a well-rounded programmer?

Leviticus Cirrrealus Titanium · 2017-09-29T13:17:31

So I've been reading about and watching videos about Smalltalk. It seems like an interesting language and damn near the Father (or Godfather) of all things OOP. But it got me thinking, what languages should a programmer know or even be proficient in to be a dependable programmer (couldn't think of a better word than "dependable")? After giving it some thought, I came up with this list. At least 1 programming language from: Lisp family of languages ML family of languages Smalltalk family of languages And also the C programming language (not the family, just the language). I think this covers all facets of programming and ways of tackling problems. I don't think there's any other language, thinking most of the modern languages, that has done anything that 4 listed above haven't already done. I'm not counting languages like Julia, R, Perl, or Erlang, because they are languages, AFAIK, that seem to solve a very specific problem. They can be general purpose, but again, AFAIK, they're not meant to be. Of course, agreements, disagreements, thorough takedowns, and/or overall discussion are welcomed.

GDNet Lounge Community General Learning Education

Started by Alpha_ProgDes September 19, 2017 06:16 PM

33 comments, last by trjh2k2 6 years, 9 months ago

SillyCow

1,534

September 29, 2017 05:57 AM

9 hours ago, Alpha_ProgDes said:

9 hours ago, SillyCow said:

Besides, would you consider a gamedev that can't build a web server well rounded?

Do I need that programmer to problem solve or be devops? If the former, then yeah, that programmer is well-rounded (enough).

I do not consider myself an enterprise dev, but I develop alot of little webservers. I find that this is the fastest route for me to develop mobile-app prototypes. I can debug them on my desktop, and they are multi-platform (ios/android/everything else) by default. Also supports networking (and multiplayer) out of the box because most firewalls will allow port 80 egress even if they block everything else. So I consider it a very useful tool in my toolbox.

I have used webservers to do everything from tracking my friends' real life poker rankings, to making VR proof of concepts. Don't knock it until you try it :-) .

My Oculus Rift Game: RaiderV

My Android VR games: Time-Rider& Dozer Driver

My browser game: Vitrage - A game of stained glass

My android games : E nemies of the Crown & Killer Bees

Finalspace

1,222

September 29, 2017 10:24 AM

4 hours ago, SillyCow said:

I do not consider myself an enterprise dev, but I develop alot of little webservers. I find that this is the fastest route for me to develop mobile-app prototypes. I can debug them on my desktop, and they are multi-platform (ios/android/everything else) by default. Also supports networking (and multiplayer) out of the box because most firewalls will allow port 80 egress even if they block everything else. So I consider it a very useful tool in my toolbox.

I have used webservers to do everything from tracking my friends' real life poker rankings, to making VR proof of concepts. Don't knock it until you try it :-) .

Well i am a full stack enterprise dev and nobody writes web servers... I think you mean web application or client/server development using something like nodejs.

My youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/F1nalspace

SillyCow

1,534

September 29, 2017 11:29 AM

48 minutes ago, Finalspace said:

Well i am a full stack enterprise dev and nobody writes web servers... I think you mean web application or client/server development using something like nodejs.

15 hours ago, SillyCow said:

Frameworks:

One of these (only if you are a games developer): OpenGL/Directx/Metal/Mantl

One of these: A popular webserver (tomcat/nodejs/python-WSGI)

Well, I certainly didn't mean that you should develop your own server. Just like I didn't mean that you should implement an openGL library directly over a graphics driver. I thought it was clear that you had to use them, not make them.

I meant that you need to learn to write a web-app using one of the popular servers.

PS: Even when I've had to develop my own web-servers in C++ (for extremely uncommon performance reasons), I used a library for the HTTP stuff...

My Oculus Rift Game: RaiderV

My Android VR games: Time-Rider& Dozer Driver

My browser game: Vitrage - A game of stained glass

My android games : E nemies of the Crown & Killer Bees

trjh2k2

432

September 29, 2017 01:17 PM

17 hours ago, SillyCow said:

would you consider a gamedev that can't build a web server well rounded?

If you mean that this hypothetical person is entirely incapable of setting up a really basic webserver, then no, I'd say that's not super well rounded- not because of the lack of knowledge, but because of the lack of being able to problem solve and do research. You can get a very basic (although super insecure) web server running pretty easily starting with zero pre-existing knowledge, after maybe 30 minutes of googling how to do it.

At the same time, I wouldn't expect the average gameplay programmer to know how to setup a web server off the top of their head. But I would hope they could figure it out if they needed to,