Programming languages are just one subset of tools used by programmers. Therefore, simply counting how many languages one knows is simplistic. It's not incidental that high-rated CS curricula don't spent most of the courses teaching new programming languages.

I know amazing polyglot programmers who just know 3-4 languages.

I agree. I would place much more emphasis on high-level mathematics, algorithms and data structures.

I believe mastering two languages with complementary strengths would be far preferable to just syntactically learning a bunch of languages.

Stated another way, I believe if someone can program at an expert level in one lisp, they probably don't need to insist on learning more of them.

If you progress to "merely adequate" in a smorgasbord of languages but all you can do is churn out CRUD apps but couldn't implement basic algorithms for a search engine you've plateaued.

I agree that simply "counting" is a useless metric. I believe what's useful is exposure to different ways of thinking about programming and problem solving. In my personal experience, exposure to imperative, functional, logic, actor, and meta-programming have all enabled me to learn more about problem solving and to think about programming at a higher level. Can you gain exposure to all of those concepts, and more, in just 3 or 4 languages? Absolutely. Does the potential for learning and growing as a programmer end there? I'd hope not!

As a related note, learning new syntax is by far the least useful aspect of learning a new language. Coincidentally, it's also the easiest element to pick up and takes little time at all. Incorporating new paradigms into your way of thinking takes far longer.

I was lucky enough at UW when I was an undergrad for our PL course to be of the buffet variety: LISP, ML, Prolog, Smalltalk. These days, most PL courses tend to focus on PL semantics, while we were taught the languages in the environments and contexts that they were meant to be used in (quite important for Smalltalk, but even for LISP).

I've also designed and implemented a few procedural, object-oriented, data-flow declarative, and logic meta-programming languages over the years. It is quite easy to get carried away with any of these paradigms, which is why I try to ground myself to working mostly with procedural imperative languages with aspects of other paradigms sprinkled in.

I couldn't agree more. I've encountered many "programmers" that know a wide range of languages, but once you begin to delve deeper you realize that its a matter of quality over quantity. "Jack of all trades, master of none."

We should clarify that knowing how to write a "Hello World" in a programming language does not make you "know" that programming language. In other words, how much should you know about a language to call yourself a polyglot?

Take the analogy from natural languages, and you're fluent in any language where you can write simple programs without consulting the documentation (or only minimal consultation), conversant in any language you can get real work done in, and speak broken language X if you know Hello World and not much more.

A polyglot should be fluent in multiple languages, from at least a couple different families, and conversant in many more.

What it means to be "fluent" in a natural language is probably even more disputed than with programming languages. It is a good metaphor in that sense though.

Fwiw, I've always understood "fluent" and "conversant" to be the opposite of above - "fluent" being the highest level, indistinguishable from a native speaker (slang, dialect, accent all spot on), while "conversant" means able to communicate and get along but obviously it's a second language to you.

I don't doubt linquists dispute something like that though.

"Fluent" has a rather vague definition, but the word root means "flowing" (like a river) - if you can speak a natural language in proper idioms without pauses in the wrong places to look for or translate words, you're fluent. "Conversant" is a rather lower standard meaning that you can have a conversation in the language and both understand and be understood.

Same here. I would never call myself fluent in Spanish, but then I've seen people on my level or worse who do and it's frustrating. I've seen plenty of similar arguments online about what it means to be fluent.

"Conversant in any language you can get real work done in", I think this is a pretty good baseline to define if you know a language or not. :)

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. — Alan Perlis

Just enough to change they way you think about programming. E.g., One need not be an expert programmer in Haskell to have learned the benefits of lazy evaluation or strong static typing.

This is why I prefer telling people about the programming paradigms I know, not the languages I know.

I'm not impressed by someone who knows Java, C#, and PHP compared to someone who knows object-oriented program, functional programming, and programming in an S-expression language.[0][1]

I've found that a multi-paradigm programmer often has superior reasoning abilities about how to write scalable, readable code.

Language acquisition within a paradigm is usually laughably easy, once you've been exposed to that paradigm in the first place. Thus, I agree with the author's argument if polyglot is defined with respect to paradigms, not languages.

[0] I'm not sure if picking up a Lisp is considered its own paradigm, but it seems radically different enough to me.

[1] This sentence is, of course, a generalization. Someone who knows every nook and cranny of a language is certainly impressive, as they can do some really remarkable things. However, this generalization has usually held up, in my experience.

My effort to becoming a polyglot programmer was to learn different languages for different jobs. For instance, my chosen languages are C, Python, Java, Javascript and more recently Go. I believe that each language is better suited for some jobs than others, and it comprises a full stack as far as languages are concerned.

But I may be working on a device driver in the morning (C) and the prototyping some UI ideas in the afternoon (javascript).

Agreed - I think that good programmers will become polyglots naturally (from picking up different tools for different jobs), which in turn will reinforce their programming skills.

Totally agree. While it's true you won't master every language you learn, I find I transfer little gems and idioms from one language into the languages I use on a daily basis. I pretty much ignored the dynamic programming available in C# until I worked with Perl for a year. I've also transferred some functional programming idioms into my Perl and Objective C.

This read like a book report.

Not so! If it were a book report, it would be returned for using light grey ink on white paper. Give teachers some credit!

In my personal experience the most talented developers have been polyglots. Not that someone who knows only two syntaxes is not useful. It must be like musicians ... when you see a person get off the drums and pick up the guitar ... it just puts you in awe.

Most programming languages are essentially the same; skills are directly transferable and you just have to learn minor syntactic difference. I would think it would be much harder to master guitar just because one already mastered drums, or the other way around.

Show me someone who has mastered computer graphics and say databases, then I'll be in awe.

I have to disagree, functional and object oriented languages produce very different solutions. Syntax is just the grammar. Compare e.g. Mandarin to a Latin based language and you will see what I mean. :)

But indeed, mastering more areas is even more impressive.

Few languages are pure FP or OOP, at least all the modern mainstream languages are hybrids. How different is python from c#? Ya, they are different but not incredibly so. Definitely not the diff between Latin and Chinese.

Which languages do you know and why did you learn them?

We are in the dog days of summer, so the amount of good content to report here has probably gone down, leading us to puff pieces like this with very little content.

I'm sorry you didn't like the post. Perhaps you can provide a little more feedback? :)

There is nothing wrong with it for what it claims to be. It is just content free and shouldn't be normally front page material, except right now there isn't much competition.

Most everyone is on vacation.

I understand where you're coming from, but I strongly disagree.

I've worked with multiple living counterexamples to your point - they only knew one language (sometimes old and non-maintained), but they could blow the next whiz-kid out of the water in terms of logical thinking and its application to software development.

IMO the only requirement to being a "programmer" is "programming", and restricting it any way beyond that hurts the field.

The guy that's been doing systems programming in C++ for 10 years should probably be considered a "programmer" despite not knowing the latest compile-to-js language of the week.

You could, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Learning a new language, say C++ -> Java is WAY more than just learning the syntax. There are best practices for solving certain kinds of problems in each language that differ between language.

Sure, there is a high level similarity between the solutions (hey, its just the observer pattern, right?), but there are also likely (IME) to be many critical differences in the details.

You could probably write C++ code in C#, Java and PHP, but it would be hideous. I've seen Fortran written in C, and Pascal written in C++, and C written in Java, and it's generally an unholy mess.

That may be true for many languages, but if those people never roll into that sort of situation it's probably fair to still call them programmers.

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” Bruce Lee

Although I have met many programmers who focus on a single language, say C# or Java, gets a lot of certifications etc.

Are they not programmers too?

I am not saying you can't focus on a single language. But for example, if you know c# than you basically know java, and you basically also know php. You could easily pick up a pretty good understanding of these languages in under a week.

If you know c++ you could basically roll right into any of those languages I named above in under a week as well.

It is sort of difficult to do anything worth doing on the web unless you have experience with at a minimum Javascript, a serverside language(php, ruby, python, c#, whatever. You could maybe do nodeJS but if you are doing that you are probably already rolling deep in knowledge anyway) and have some experience with some kind of sql like database language. I'm not even counting html or css which aren't real languages but are still things you need to have some understanding of. Also there is a good chance you have a basic understanding of setting up apache and a linux server in a cloud environment.

If you're doing any of this stuff you have probably tinkered with mobile and maybe have some obj-c experience or at least java on android.

Everything is just so tied together these days unless you are just like, a day job programmer you probably have experience with a ton of languages and could get some code going in a bunch of others very very quickly.

I think you're conflating "knowing" a language with knowing the syntax of a language.

It was an easy transition into C++ syntax from my usual C#/Java programming, but the transition into thinking like a C++ programmer was not a simple or easy one. Weeks (months?) later, I am still learning how to be a "good" C++ programmer.

I remember "learning" PHP when I was younger and could probably program quite a few things with it still but I am definitely not a PHP programmer. I have no idea what is considered good or bad practice in PHP land. I could solve a bunch of Project Euler problems in PHP but I could not write a secure PHP application for actual use.

The same goes for most languages I can think of. I've fiddled around with it, written a few small programs, gotten a feel for the standard library, but unless I use that language on a decent sized project I have nothing but a superficial understanding of it.

If you already know how to program, "learning" a new language is trivial, you can do it in a few days, sometimes even a few hours. Learning to write "good" code in that language is not something that is easy to pick up or something that is transfers between languages, even closely related languages like C and C++ or C# and Java.

It's easy transiting from C++ to Java/C#, the the reverse transition is not as easy. I would say that the "mental toolbox" of a C++ programmer includes a lot of things that also belong in a Java programmer's "toolbox" (i.e. classes, inheritance, virtual functions), which helps someone who knows C++ pick up Java relatively easily. But there are important aspects of C++ that are NOT in the Java toolbox, i.e. manual memory management, pointers, templates (which are way different from generics in java, by the way), these make the reverse transition harder.

Lets not forget the polymaths in this analysis.