Larry Wall: 5 Programming Languages Everyone Should Know | Big Think

Larry Wall shares his perspective on five programming languages that every programmer should learn to broaden their thinking.

Larry Wall: 5 Programming Languages Everyone Should Know | New videos DAILY: bigth.ink/youtube Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: bigth.ink/Edge ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Programmer Larry Page offers language suggestions to amateur programmers who might not know exactly where to start. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Larry Wall is the computer programmer responsible for creating Perl, a powerful general-purpose programming language known for its strengths in text processing. Wall, whose graduate work was in linguistics, designed Perl in 1987 for reports processing and continues to oversee the language's development according to the motto "Larry is always right, even when he was wrong." He also originated the three canonical "virtues" of a good programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: Back when I was getting started, lo these many decades ago, the answers would've been Fortran, Cobalt, Basic, Lisp, and maybe APL, and those were very formative languages back then and people learned a lot from those, but these days, it might be more important for you to know JavaScript, even if the only reason you know that is that you know whether or not to click the "enable JavaScript" button in your browser. But JavaScript is a nice, lightweight, object-oriented language and that's why it can fit in a browser and do these things such as run little programs that help you input your data and then send it off to a web server somewhere. There are heavier-weight object-oriented languages and the elephant in the room is sort of Java, you can't really make a list of modern languages without talking about it. Java is sort of the Cobalt of the 21st century, I think. It's kind of heavyweight, verbose, and everyone loves to hate it, though not everyone will admit that. But managers kind of like it because it looks like you're getting a lot done, you know, if 100 lines of Java code accomplish a task, then it looks like you've written 100 lines, even though in a different language, it might only take 5 lines. You know, it's like, you know, you can eat a 1-pound steak or you can eat, you know, 100 pounds of shoe leather and you feel a greater sense of accomplishment after the shoe leather, but, you know, maybe they're some downsides. Oh, what other languages? I think going in a different direction, coming more from academia, we have a language like Haskell, which we call a functional programming language. That means function in a mathematical sense, not in the sense the other languages are dysfunctional. But a function mathematically has an input and an output and it maps to, you know, with a great deal of mathematical certainty what those are. Haskell is one of those languages that mathematician-type-minded people love; it's sort of a lan