On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Steve Howell <showel...@yahoo.com> wrote: > On Mar 22, 6:11 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve > +comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >> In any case, I'm not talking about the best developers. I'm talking about >> the typical developer, who by definition is just average. They probably >> know reasonably well one to three of the half dozen most popular >> languages (VB, Java, C, C+, Javascript, PHP, Perl?) plus regexes and SQL, >> and are unlikely to know any of Prolog, Lisp, Haskell, Hypertalk, >> Mercury, Cobra, Smalltalk, Ada, APL, Emerald, Inform, Forth, ... > > I love how you can rattle off 20 or so languages, just off the top of > your head, and not even mention Ruby. ;)
If I were to rattle off a couple dozen languages, it probably wouldn't include Ruby either. Never learned it, don't (as yet) know what its advantage domain is. My list "runs somewhat thus": BASIC, 80x86 Assembly, C, C++, Java, REXX, Pascal, Pike, Perl, PHP, Javascript, DeScribe Macro Language, Scheme, Python, ActionScript, DOS Batch, Lua, COBOL, FORTRAN, Ada, Modula-2, LPC, Erlang, Haskell... and that's not counting things like POV-Ray or LilyPond that aren't exactly _programming_ languages, although in some cases you could shoehorn an application into them. Granted, I do have some rather strange and esoteric interests, and I'm sure that Ruby is far better known than DeScribe Macro Language (!!), but I think first of those I've used, and then of the most famous. Sorry Ruby. No slight meant! :) ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list