Originally Posted by
1clue
I agree with previous posters. You will have a huge variation based on what purpose the developers are designing to.
Right now I'm doing mostly web development, which means I'm really using a stack of languages anyway. Groovy, Java, Javascript, html, Freemarker, sql for several different engines, just off the top of my head, for just the current projects. And all those languages for each project.
For UN*X scripting, you get: Perl, Bash, sed, awk, ruby. For UN*X developing, C and C++.
I could go on quite a bit, but won't. Another branch of the discussion actually took my attention, which is the bizarre languages part.
<digression type="reminisce">
The one that comes to mind is from back in the late '80s or maybe early '90s called DataFlow. It was a drag and drop "object oriented" language for the Mac. The icon was a toilet, and it had icons for all sorts of constructs and you connected it with pipes. When you ran the program each icon would shake as code went through it, and each pipe would shake between steps. It was buggy as heck, and it would crash but the components would continue shaking anyway, even while you rebooted your Mac. It was totally useless except you could waste a few weekends finding new and inventive ways to make it crash. It also made a pretty good drinking game because it was so slow you could read what happened, and you had a chance to breathe between drinks when your branch of code got hit multiple times.
Another one from about that time was Hypercard. It was object oriented in a bizarre natural language way, that was I suppose closer to Lisp than anything else I know. At the time 2400 baud modems were pretty high class and 9600 baud was just getting to the experimental stage. The Internet existed and we used it, but it was still only for schools so the BBS was king. My buddies and I were playing a game, I think it was TradeWars. You had to outfit star ships and take over planets, it was fun but an organizational nightmare. I wrote a robot in Hypercard to play the game. I logged in, downloaded the map and got status on all my planets and ships, then signed off. My program would maintain a certain number of troops and ships in each place, and then I would allocate the rest of my resources by looking at the map. Then I would log in and paste the hypercard-generated script into the game. I won the first game after a close battle, but after that nobody wanted to play the second time.
</digression>
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