I'm planning on developing apps on the IPhone and Android soon.
I get confused sometimes when programming (e.g. putting semicolons at the end of the statement (C#) when writing python code).
What's your experience with actively using different languages on a daily basis?
Sometimes I go for so long not touching anything but Lisp, I end up writing weird stuff like "defstruct foo { int bar, char name};" whenever I need to wrap a C library to call out to :-P
[If any Lispers are reading this: I have this weird problem where I have a slime session running on screen for weeks, during which I write something in a temporary file, or inside another file, evaluate and edit it until it works .. but I forget it there! over time, the running application has little resemblance to the textual representations I have spread over several files, and it gets worse when I delete entire useless regions and refactor them. At least other languages have the decency to bondage-and-discipline me into naming my files and organizing the project hierarchy :-]
To borrow a quote from the movie Highlander - "There can be only one (file)!"
but after that it's one file, until it gets too bloated and redundant, then i break it to two small redundant pieces.
Thought sometimes its too tempting to do everything in the repl: cramming a fat piece of code into one form and save the result as (setf foo *) if I like what I see :-D usually for experimentation with a new library I'm using for the first time.
Work: Perl, Bash, Python, PHP, Javascript/jQuery/in house stuff, ASP, Java/Jboss/Fast/JSP, ColdFusion, Soap, XML/XSL, Sql Server, Oracle, Mysql, Subversion
Huge lists on both sides, but there's a main difference: If something is broken over work, I have to fix. I don't exactly know Java or ColdFusion that much, but if the Java guy is away and something needs to be done, I know enough to poke around and consult Google.
On the Side: I don't exactly know all of D, Erlang and CouchDB, but I have fun coding small things on each language from time to time, doing stuff on Project Euler. I wouldn't accept a paying job which required Erlang, for example, but I made simple a distributed crawler just to see what the platform is capable of. I think I know enough of each to at least understand its strengths and weakness on a higher-level, to know when it could be used as a solution. When I want to do something more serious, I choose Python.
Anyway, to trim the lists a little, I would say Python on Side, and PHP on Work. These languages get 75% of my time.
I've been learning Common Lisp and Python for a while, though because my company uses those languages above, and because I haven't started any new projects yet for new languages, and because PHP has been my primary language for 5 years now, I think in PHP.
I have to broaden my horizons.
I've got some fun ideas for projects to tinker with that would use some other languages (recently bought books on Erlang, Haskell, Clojure, and Ruby). And though they likely wouldn't generate much if any revenue, it's worth doing something practical just to learn some new languages.
Back when I used to do PHP on my own, and VP ASP for my employer, I was regularly messing up if and loop syntaxes, and <? and <%, and either forgetting or adding semicolons.
1. Matlab
2. C++
3. C(I ask because I also use Matlab all the time, but I am curious what others are using it for.)
Or rather, when will there be a YC/HN startup analyzing neural data?
Movable Type, with Perl. Some Django, and non-Django stuff with Python. Hacking on Active Collab, written in PHP. Rely heavily on jQuery for JavaScript these days. Chicken Scheme for some random exploration now and again.
I've become pretty good at context switching between them all. I make mistakes sure, but I don't spend more than 5 seconds writing JavaScript in a .py file.
edit: For the record, I frequently switch between Flex, Java, PHP/SQL, C, Lisp / Clojure, and a couple of other scripting/markup languages.
Various paid projects over the past year have used Ruby, Common Lisp, Javascript and PHP.
Emacs Lisp sees use for both on occasion, for a total of 9.
I agree, it sometimes seems too much and I wish for some standardization.
At night, I was working on some Smalltalk and Clojure; but a friend of mine has recently convinced me to give Groovy / Grails a go.
Yes, I do occasionally run into idiomatic problems as I switch languages, but it is better than coming home and doing Java. :)
foreach (int i in myInts) { ... }
For Each i As Integer In myInts ... Next
foreach ($myInts as $i) { ... }
I am slowly adding Clojure to this mix.
The most dissonant cognitive shift is going from Lisp to Objective C.
Perl, Smalltalk, Ruby, SQL, bash, make, xhtml, css, Seaside
Dips into python and C from time to time
Play: LISP, SuperCollider, Max/MSP, Processing
Fun!