>>>>>Modern music gives me the same feeling. Who are these people and what the heck are they doing? In my book if you don't play an instrument and don't sing you aren't a musician. Passe, I guess. Maybe I really am an old fart.
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>depends how "modern music" is defined. One week ago I saw eval(STUFF("Boo",3,0,"n")) [@Mike B: just to keep Boo in the discussion] here in Frankfurt. Somebody bent on classical music will shudder, but for me guys like U2 still playing is fun. Lots of clips on youtube, but I hide very well...
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>>I don't think I'm in the same cell block as some. I don't want 15 ways to do everything multiplied by 15000 languages. That is obviously insane.
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>Weeelllll, I remember bygone days where you did write mathmatical programs *only* in FORTRAN, did systems programming *mostly* in C, ran away from anybody asking you to code in COBOL for financial institutions, implemented something tricky first in Pascal or Modula2 [as they had always boundschecking available], had fire&forget basic scripts and trees of batch files and dBase was a thing rumored about [on CP/M cards for your 6502-computer]. Prolog I read about and turtle logo was not interesting... And the trouble started whenever you needed to pipe results from one app/language to the other. Today it is smooth sailing compared to that - if it weren't for those pesky managment guys...
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>I aim to keep fluent in a static compiled environment, meaning C# and java - which you can code for almost identical up to .Net3.5. I want to have one scripting language I can run all by itself or can hook into the runtime I must work on: this currently is Python, as standalone CPython, Jython in java or Ironpython in Dotnet. If you don't need to hook into GUI those 3 implementations are better in source compatibility than Quicksilver, Dbase3, Clipper87, dBman and so on ever were. If Python (a really nice way to code) will not be alive in both managed runtimes in the future, I will look at javascript - which is still better than always in a static straightjacketed.
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>vfp and SQL are on a different boat still: I want to have an OOP framework for SQL scripts, which I have grown in vfp for more than a dozen years, but could move over to either python or Javascript: Might have an edge in the OOP capabilities there, but the integration and quick visual testing of vfp would be gone. Is a special case of datamining. Having C as a fallback for all of the above is seldom necessary: I probably wrote less than 15 days of C in this century - in java style.
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>Reading code in other languages gives me a much broader horizon on how problems can be solved - and then I can try to find a suitable approximation for the language/runtime I currently work in. I do want to keep it as simple as possible, but don't want to get too stale... Reading well written code is fun and educational. As CPU characteristics are changing, looking about you is necessary.
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>regards
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>thomas

Well written code? Where on Earth do you find that? :) I think I learn more from reading bad code.

That is the reality of things today, but it is ridiculous. It is like requiring a nurse be fluent in 10 languages to work in a hospital because there might be patients speaking any of 10 languages. It is like requiring a mechanic be fluent in 10 languages so he can work on a car, because the spark plugs are from Germany, the radio is from China, the seats are from the US, the carpet is from India...

Jack of all trades, master of none.