Ultimately it's a waste of time to spend so much time on different languages. If I had to retake my path I would have jumped into C++ and never looked back. In reality only the specialist really shine in what they do. There's no reason to try and be good at everything. My teacher once told me; sometimes you need to learn to love what you hate and embrace it.

That's what defines if you truly are willing to walk down the path you really set out for you. Don't plan things years ahead, I know plenty of things I wanted to get taken care of that never happened because my priorities changed. Just get started.

Ultimately it's a waste of time to spend so much time on different languages.

Patently untrue.

Even if you never wind up using most of the other languages, they will give you new ways to think about solving problems, and that will almost inevitably make you a better programmer.

SharkBaitHooHaHa,

My philosophy for learning languages being the new learner in them which I am, is this:

Learning Languages
1) Need in the short term is survival.
2) Want is close behind because desire and keeping interest both drive you forward and inspire creativity.
3) Preparation for future demands keeps you ready for new challenges.

With these in mind I will be ordering my language learning priorities. I hope this helps.


Questions for the programmers: Would imperative programming add a strong tendancy for spontaneity in a game for the player just by nature?

1) What are the two most imperative languages?
2) What are the two most declarative languages?
3) Is functional programming independent of the previous two characterstics or not necessarily? To me this seems to depend on the language, is this not correct?

In the mid 1980s I studied Basic and COBOL, loving the imperative because I could either make something happen the same way every time or add randomness in the "Then" of the statement. This is why I believe a heavily imperative language is good for spontaneity of the player in the game while keeping order, too.

Recursion seems to be the ideal approach in many situations for complex circumstances, but would it not hurt game performance if used very much, risking FPS drop instances due to "perfect storms" of too much processing at certain moments?

It seems to me that imperative would be the best in general for game performance. Which of these mentioned (imperative, declarative, or functional) is the best for performance? ( All other things being equal.)


3Ddreamer

"You can have large sea of knowledge, but have it only be puddle deep. Likewise you can have a puddle that is miles deep. But in the end, the most interesting sea is the one that is expansive and populated with shallows and deep ends."

Exactly. Once you know 1 language, the learning curve for the next language in the list just drops drastically. So the idea that knowing too many languages somehow gives you less understanding of each one, isn't usually the case (unless you insist on learning every single thing there is to know about 20 different languages).

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@ DZee:
Remember that your brain is an amazing device (in fact the most complex object known to man - a hypermassive star is less complex), it's vastly capable of storing information and there's even ways to "learn how to learn" things. I think you're making a solid point about specialization though, that it can be superior to generalization in many respects. But that's only true if we're talking about comparable time spent on either. Typically it's a transverging (? see below) relationship:

My ad lib theorem on learning:
"The more you generalize, the less time you spend on learning each new field.
The more you specialize, the more time you spend on that one field."

The golden mean of the above is when you've specialized enough so that further specialization becomes less effective than studying other fields to complement your own. Specialization is usually all about what you're actually doing. Generalization is usually about what you know. It's when you let generalization dictate your actions or specialization dictate your knowledge, that problems occur.

husilardee,

That is an interest point.

If the developer wants to have his game cover two different APIs, then is there really a single shader language which will allow it?


3Ddreamer

husilardee,

That is an interest point.

If the developer wants to have his game cover two different APIs, then is there really a single shader language which will allow it?

3Ddreamer

CG works with both OpenGL and D3D, (I'm not sure where it stands featurewise these days but nvidia is usually decent at keeping their stuff up to date)