One of my biggest problems with the IT community, both in amateur programmers and prospective employers, is the following question: “So, what programming languages do you know?” This implies that learning a language is an extremely difficult task, and collecting languages like trophies is somehow a worthy pursuit.
A programming language is a tool. A skilled craftsman isn’t good at her trade because she knows how to use a given set of tools; anyone can learn that. Rather, true skill comes from knowing how to *apply* the tools. The fundamental concepts behind programming are the skills on which we should be focusing.
This applies to academia as well. The language you use to teach students, especially the first language they encounter, *is* important. I’m not about to advocate “teaching languages” like Pascal, though. I think it’s important to choose a real-world language, with all the pitfalls and caveats of a real-world language, as a student’s first language. At the same time, it should be a language with the features available to demonstrate all the fundamental concepts in programming. A language that doesn’t support recursion would be a Bad Choice, for example.
So, when someone (a peer or a hopeful programmer-to-be) asks me “what languages do you know?”, I won’t respond “Well, I know C, C++, Java, perl, php, xhtml/xml/css (if you count those), lisp, prolog, LotusScript, Javascript, LSL…” etc. Instead, I’ll say “I’ve used a number of languages, but the key thing is that I know how to learn any language.” When an employer asks, I suppose I’ll have to say “Well, I know @languages…”. Then, though, I might add “…but I consider the fundamental concepts behind programming languages to be more important, because mastering those means I can learn to get around in any language given a week or two of study.”
In summary: Learning a programming language is trivial, once you know the fundamental concepts of programming.
