Interesting that this came from InfoWorld. Back in the day, the magazine never talked about programming. That was left to Byte, Dr Dobbs, and Popular Electronics, among others. Computer "languages" are interesting. And in my career, I have had to move from language to language. So:
- COBOL, so I could help my father with his homework
- BASIC, when a PDP-8 showed up at junior high
- FORTRAN II, because that's what my high school taught.
- PL/I, the "next new thing" (1969)
- 360 Assembler, so I could document a bug I found in the PL/I compiler
- FORTRAN IV
- C, the "next new thing" (1972)
- MIX, because The Art of Computer Programming
- ALGOL, class book assignment -- never used it
- PL/I again, so I could teach a class in the language as part of CS 306, Operating systems.
- GLIPNER, because ILLIAC IV
- LINC microassembler, because there was one in the basement at school
- PASCAL, so I could run my own compiler and run time on a minicomputer
- PL/M, because Intel
- BASIC again, because IBM PC
- PASCAL again, because Perq graphic workstation
- PDP-11 assembler, because there was one down the hall
- 808x assembler, because I could, and various C packages didn't cut it
- PERL, because Unix system administration
- SH and BASH, because Unix system administration
- LEX and YACC, because inventing my own language made particular problems MUCH easier to solve and maintain
- PHP, because commercial Web site
- TCL and EXPECT, because inter-computer automation
- Python, because $DAYJOB loved buzzwords.
And I don't expect that to be the end of the list. Most of these things I have dropped by the wayside.
I have JAVA books, but never took the time to learn the language because I didn't have a need for it. Read the ADA Language Standard, but never had a machine with a compiler to play with.
I keep hearing about other "new" languages that have enhancements for security; someday I'll have a reason to try them. I don't know their names yet.
Quite the parade, isn't it?