The four programming language groups everyone should learn a language well from…

I saw a reddit question today that was something along the lines of “I’d like to learn 16 languages in a year, which ones should I learn?” This of course sounds ludicrous to me and I definitely advocate against that. I think a better goal for working in a year (and this is stretching it) is to learn a language from the four major language groups (in my opinion) well. This is by no means an authoritative list of languages, but rather a list of languages that just by learning them can teach you things that other languages wouldn’t and thus make you a better programmer.

Lisp - It seems that many ideas and features people look for, Lisp already has, so take some time to learn them here, it’ll definitely make you a better programmer.

Haskell - Everything is a function, and thus you have no side effects. This will teach you to right better code in that you will end up trying to reduce side effects in your Java/C++/Python etc. code.

Erlang/Smalltalk - The beauty of message passing comes out in both these languages, Erlang more in a truly distributed manner. I personally am learning Erlang and love it.

C/Assembly - Working in lower level languages like these two will teach a you a lot about thinking about how you write something will effect different architectures. I know C and haven’t had a chance to really play with Assembly yet.

I’m half way through that list, that is I’ve learned C & Erlang pretty well, next is Lisp. I think those are some of the best you learn. Learn a few things well, the others will come, languages are merely syntax, its the idioms, paradigms and skills that will make you a better programmer, not the language.