Larry Wall: 5 Pro­gram­ming Lan­guages Ev­ery­one Should Know

• Re­port rights in­fringe­ment
• pub­lished: 13 Jun 2011
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Don't miss new Big Think videos! Sub­scribe by click­ing here: http://​goo.​gl/​CPTsV5 Java is "heavy­weight, ver­bose, and ev­ery­one loves to hate it," but Wall still thinks you should know it. Ques­tion: What are the five pro­gram­ming lan­guages ev­ery­one, even non-pro­gram­mers, should know about and why? Larry Wall:  Oh, boy, that's a re­al­ly tough ques­tion.  It's kind of like ask­ing what are the five coun­tries you should know about if you're not in­ter­est­ed in ge­ol­o­gy, or ge­og­ra­phy, or pol­i­tics, and the an­swer varies de­pend­ing on what your ac­tu­al in­ter­ests are, or what are the five com­pa­nies you should know.  And the an­swer changes over time, too.  Back when I was get­ting start­ed, lo these many decades ago, the an­swers would've been For­tran, Cobalt, Basic, Lisp, and maybe APL, and those were very for­ma­tive lan­guages back then and peo­ple learned a lot from those, but these days, it might be more im­por­tant for you to know JavaScript, even if the only rea­son you know that is that you know whether or not to click the "en­able JavaScript" but­ton in your brows­er.  But JavaScript is a nice, lightweight, ob­ject-ori­ent­ed lan­guage and that's why it can fit in a brows­er and do these things such as run lit­tle pro­grams that help you input your data and then send it off to a web serv­er some­where. There are heav­ier-weight ob­ject-ori­ent­ed lan­guages and the ele­phant in the room is sort of Java, you can't re­al­ly make a list of mod­ern lan­guages with­out talk­ing about it.  Java is sort of the Cobalt of the 21st cen­tu­ry, I think. It's kind of heavy­weight, ver­bose, and ev­ery­one loves to hate it, though not ev­ery­one will admit that.  But man­agers kind of like it be­cause it looks like you're get­ting a lot done, you know, if 100 lines of Java code ac­com­plish a task, then it looks like you've writ­ten 100 lines, even though in a dif­fer­ent lan­guage, it might only take 5 lines.  You know, it's like, you know, you can eat a 1-pound steak or you can eat, you know, 100 pounds of shoe leather and you feel a greater sense of ac­com­plish­ment after the shoe leather, but, you know, maybe they're some down­sides. But it also, be­cause it is sort of con­sid­ered an in­dus­tri­al lan­guage and pro­gram­mers are sort of in­ter­change­able parts, man­agers like it for that rea­son, and for that rea­son, a lot of Java jobs have been out­sourced from the Unit­ed States. Oh, what other lan­guages?  I think going in a dif­fer­ent di­rec­tion, com­ing more from academia, we have a lan­guage like Haskell, which we call a func­tion­al pro­gram­ming lan­guage. That means func­tion in a math­e­mat­i­cal sense, not in the sense the other lan­guages are dys­func­tion­al.  But a func­tion math­e­mat­i­cal­ly has an input and an out­put and it maps to, you know, with a great deal of math­e­mat­i­cal cer­tain­ty what those are.  Haskell is one of those lan­guages that math­e­mati­cian-type-mind­ed peo­ple love; it's sort of a lan­guage for ge­nius­es, by ge­nius­es.  So you should prob­a­bly know about it, if only to be able to say, "Well, is this kind of like Haskell?"  And if so, then you know you have to hire some re­al­ly smart peo­ple to pro­gram in it.  Haskell is sort of a mod­ern kind of Lisp in that sense. What else?  Well, we can't leave off mod­ern lan­guages with­out talk­ing about C.  The C lan­guage, that's just spelled with the let­ter C, is ac­tu­al­ly about 40 years old, but peo­ple have tried to re­place C with other lan­guages that are like it and have by and large not suc­ceed­ed be­cause C is a very min­i­mal­is­tic lan­guage and very close to the metal, as we say, on a ma­chine, and lets you get down and do very fine grain stuff, very ef­fi­cient­ly, but it's a lot of hard work.  But once you've done that work, you can run it pret­ty much ev­ery­where.  So al­most all the other lan­guages that you see, Java, Perl, what­ev­er, ac­tu­al­ly if you look down un­der­neath, they're ac­tu­al­ly im­ple­ment­ed in C, or in a close­ly re­lat­ed lan­guage.  So that con­tin­ues to be a very fun­da­men­tal lan­guage, if only be­cause ev­ery­one is try­ing to rein­vent it and not suc­ceed­ing in doing so. And fi­nal­ly, for a fifth lan­guage, well, you'd prob­a­bly want to pick one of the script­ing lan­guages.  There's sev­er­al to choose from, there's Python, there's Ruby, but of course, I am prej­u­diced in favor of Perl, be­cause I think it has the liveli­est com­mu­ni­ty and be­cause we have in­ten­tion­al­ly been re­design­ing it late­ly to leapfrog all the other lan­guages. For the last num­ber of years, we've been re­design­ing it to out all the warts that we've no­ticed over time.  And we fig­ured it was just our one chance to break back­ward com­pat­i­bil­i­ty, break the things that need break­ing, keep all the things that make Perl, Perl, keep it a joy to use, and with this re­design, make it a lan­guage that will be able to be use­ful and en­joy­able for decades.  And so I'd rec­om­mend Perl, but I'm known to be prej­u­diced in the mat­ter.