I agree almost completely with frob with a gigantic butt... er, but...

As a successful programmer, you will be exposed to a number of languages, the good programmers embrace this and come to look at languages like a carpenter looks at tools. As it would be folly to try and nail down a board using a screw driver, the same is true for programming languages. Certain language excel in certain situations, while other languages excel in other situations. Learning one language will make it a great deal easier to learn another language, while learning multiple languages will probably change the way you approach languages you already know ( for good or bad... theres a lot of Java-fied C++ out there because of this... ).

BUT...

This is the beginners forum, and telling someone to learn multiple languages is a very bad suggestion... initially.

Pick one, stick to it and learn how to program. THEN pick another language. With your first language you are going to also be learning programming at the same time. This is why many of us ( myself included ) recommend a more learning friendly language when you are just starting out, the more streamlined your learning experience is, the better. Trying to learn more than one language right off the bat is just dumb. DONT.

Down the road, once you've (honestly) hit a roadblock with your current language, then start looking at other languages. When I hear someone come into these forums ( the beginner forums ) and make claims like "I know C++, C# and Java... what _____ should I do" or worse "I don't like ____ language, it's not powerful enough". News flash for you... for the first, to completely make a number up... say.... year of your programming career *YOU* are the limiting factor, not your language.

Thing is, down the road learning new languages becomes a bit of a joke. Hell, any scripting language worth it's salt, you shouldn't even have to "learn"... you should be able to pick it up, read a bit of the language manual and get to work accomplishing 90% of what you need to accomplish. Once you've got one language down, the next language is infinitely easier, and then the language after that is easier still. Then you try to learn functional programming, have a brain anurism, then come back thinking... "hey, ____ wasn't so hard after all!". ( BTW, functional programming isn't that hard... it just requires a completely different approach ).

So yes, learn multiple languages, learn as many languages as you can. Hell, if you are any kind of a programmer, you will probably start learning new languages simply because they interest you. I certainly know everytime a new language ( Loom, Typescript, Dart, Ruby, etc... ) pops up, I spend at least a few days with it... it's a compulsion of sorts.

But for the love of all the is holy, don't learn multiple languages until you've actually learned to program!

In terms of writing in a language, more modern languages than C++ are just so absurdly easier to use that I really think anyone that is disagreeing just hasn't -tried- them. But people have this unrealistic almost elitist fear that "if I stop using C or C++ or something then I will grow lazy and stagnant and never innovate." Really I was talking to someone about C# compared to C++ yesterday involving smart pointers vs just being able to create everything with new and throw it to the wind, and for some unknown reason he got all defensive and said to the effect of: "Well when you're lazy and don't care at all about performance its fine to use a language that babies you like that." Like really people, drop the elitist 20th century view.

Age grants one many things. In my particular case, my visions getting worse, I yell at people to get off my lawn even though I don't have one, things hurt that never used to hurt and... you start to see patterns in things.

The attitude towards C++ is nothing new, only the actors on stage change in this particular play. When I started programming, well technically I was using BASIC because that was the only option available to me ( which was a very good thing btw... ), but once I started programming "for real" there was a huge backlash against people that used C, because real programmers used assembly. There were actually gaming companies that wrote programs completely in assembly welllll after that was a patently stupid thing to do. ( I think Novalogic fit this description, but age also clouds the brain... ).

Of course, over time hardware got a bit faster, C compiler got a bit better and people started favoring programmer productivity over RAW speed, especially when the speed difference became incredibly narrow. So naturally C supplanted assembly as the primary language of games and assembly, while still used, became a bit less common, then eventually became downright niche.

A very similar thing happened again eventually with C++. C programmers looked down their noses at people that used C++, although C++ starting as a superset of C did lesson the friction a great deal. Eventually though, C++ became the defacto choice and C is now a bit more niche, or I suppose, domain specific is a better way of putting it.

The key is though, every single time a language transition happened, there was an ego factor involved, an e-peen waving that really had no place in all of it. Plus, every time a transition did in fact happen, the old code never did go away, nor did the older languages completely disappear. Plus, amazingly enough, after the transition occurred, life amazingly enough went on.

We are at another interesting point, where the demands of the system are lessening. John Carmack just recently said that programmers aren't really going to be able to easily max out the next gen hardware. I'm paraphrasing him brutally, so here is the direct quote:

"I think that the writing's on the wall that pushing things to their absolute limit is not really tenable for the most part in development," he said. "There's just too much you can do... Nowadays no one person even has the entire capabilities of one of these modern platforms in their head...

"There's too much to wind up with this crystal jewel of perfection like you might have at least have deluded yourself into thinking you were approaching in previous years. So development is a lot more about trying to get the good value out of the time that you can put into it."

Times change, priorities change, needs change... and so do programming languages.

I think C hit off because it was more source portable than assembly.

Something like C# however is not more source portable than C or C++ (since the runtime source is written in those two languages for a start)

It may be more binary portable but frankly phones and tablets are so limited and restricted these days anyway that you cant simply drop the .exe onto their memory cards and run it, so is a completely useless feature.

For this reason, C#, Java, etc... don't offer me any benefits I care about. I can still only target every device out there using C and C++.

Heck, (and referring to another thread) Microsoft couldn't even write an operating system in C#, they had to develop in sing# in the end to add "low-level programming language constructs, which are necessary for implementing system software" to actually do anything useful (based on spec#) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_Sharp)

Don't get me wrong, the managed languages are quite pleasant to use. If they output native assemblies (and there is no reason to suggest one day that a compiler to do this wont exist) then I would indeed seriously consider using it. If more third party libraries supported being compiled using the the native Java compiler (gcj), I would probably use it with no issues.

For me personally, it isnt about the language but more the platform that they force you to use. For example I wouldnt use C++/clr, C++/cx, managed C++ or any of that either.