Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

DRANK

Imagine we’ve been handed a task and we’re free to choose the programming language. The assignment involves all sorts of string manipulation: reading strings, splitting strings, trimming, joining and running regular expressions over strings, everything in UTF-8 and, of course, emojis need to work. Which language do we choose? C? Oh, please no.Another job, this time at a financial institution. We need to do tens of thousands of concurrent calculations. High performance is a hard requirement. Should we use… Ruby? Come on. Next up: a one-off script that renames a bunch of files… written in Java? A web browser… in Python? Programming a controller for a medical device with… C#? Swift? Lua? You get the point.Different programming languages are good at different things and bad at others. Each one makes certain things easier and in turn others harder. Depending on what we want to do we can save ourselves a lot of work by choosing the language that makes solving the type of problem we’r…