Hi everyone, Just wanted to get a good discussion going on the merits of knowing and using lingua archae vs lingua franca. Lingua archae is my term for languages that once were popular but have been fading out of fashion and entered a general state of disuse. Languages such as Perl, RPG, COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, assembler and of course the list goes on and on.
Lingua franca being languages which are so commonly used now that they are considered "essential" to know Some good examples are C/C++ and to a lesser extent C# Java, Python, PHP and well thats about all off the top of my head. As a programmer myself, I'm finding that even though I don't use the archaic languages much if at all anymore, having them on my resume is the chief reason for recruiters to come calling. What I think is bothering me the most about it is that even though the majority of HR people are looking for these older languages, the companies themselves aren't using them, (with maybe the exception Perl for the purposes of porting apps away from Perl) however they are generating a rather large percentage of the calls I'm getting. Is it worthwhile then to maybe spend some time brushing up on these languages? Or would it be better to "trim the fat" from my resume and drop these languages all together? Any thoughts? Anyone using some of these older languages mind chiming in on what you use them for? Are some of these older languages coming back into regular use? Anyways as always thanks for the replies. Sincerely, Steve /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
