At one point this morning I was thinking about what subject to tackle next and I started thinking about all of the different programming languages that I’m currently, actively, writing in at the moment between all of my contract and personal projects. It was getting a little scary when I realized there were about 6 different languages that I write in on an almost daily basis at my contract job, and another 2 that I kind of hack around with at home.
Contract #1
HTML5 Apps
– Javascript using the Sencha Touch and EXTJS framework
– Java for custom native Cordova plugins on Android
– Objective-C and Swift for custom native Cordova plugins on iOS
Main Web app and Webservices
– C# for latest main application and mobile REST services
– VB for previous main application still supported by the client
– Java for a custom web service for solving routing problems using jsprit
– TSQL for database stored procedures
Contract #2
50BookPledge.ca
– PHP for dynamic web pages
– Javacript for the usual cool site interaction stuff
84 North Studios Projects
SilverBeak.com
– Python using bottlepy for the site
And a bunch of other things using a combination of all of the languages already mentioned
That list ended up being bigger than I thought it was going to be when I first started writing this post. I had to go back and update the language count in the first paragraph a couple of times.
Listing all those out has started to worry me a bit about how well I actually know those languages. The doubt started creeping in yesterday when I stumbled on Standard JS Style and read through a couple of links. Mainly the part about not using semicolons to terminate a line. I knew they weren’t required, but I didn’t know why or in what situations you’d need to either make exceptions or handle the fact that the js interpreter might get confused (like starting a line with [ ( and some other chars). I’ve since done the requisite reading and now have the knowledge, but that just leads me to think what else don’t I know that I DON’T KNOW? I think I need to start trying to just buckle down and specialize in one or two of these areas that I use a lot and just learn all there is to know. I’m leaning towards javascript, and maybe even dumping PHP in favour of nodejs since I’ve been wanting to use it for a project lately but don’t know for what yet.
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