To share some thoughts on this thread, on this thread, I'd like to post this thus somehow recursive entry
I want to plead for learning more languages, even if you know you are not going to use them very often. On the university here, you are hit with imperative languages, functional languages and object oriented ones, typeless and type strict ones. Even if you know that you are not going to use
scheme very often, learning such different languages does wonders for your thinking. A mind once stretched sufficiently enough never regains the original limits, as it is said. Also your jaw may drop when the tutor writes a huffman encoder in some lines on the blackboard.
Oh, and then throw in event driven things like verilog and VHDL, and suddenly a talent for spotting race conditions might manifest itself. I know all this sounds a little like boasting, but belive me : I could not write ten lines of verilog, VHDL or scheme (or others) now which would be accepted by the most sloppy compiler for them, because I did not use them since university. But it leaves traces in your ability to think, which George Orwell addressed with his
newspeak in 1984. Your vocabulary shapes what you can say, and thus what you can think. And if your mental vocabulary does not contain things like
always @, you might have trouble with efficiently thinking about event driven user interfaces or race conditions.
So, while we all have our 'favorite' language, please please do not stop there, and please do not stay too close to the language you prefer all the time. You might learn something suprising, or something useful. But you will learn something.
