So I recently realized that while I often read blogs and social media comments about a really wide variety of languages, I actually only tend to use a handful on actual projects I work on. I’m most comfortable with C# and Type/Javascript, so those are the tools I use to solve programming problems I encounter. I have about 5 years of experience in both, and between the two, I can write code for basically every platform thanks to projects like mono and the ubiquity of Javascript. They’re really versatile languages.
That’s all fine and well, but I want to break out of my comfort zone a bit and actually write code in all of these languages I frequently hear about. At first I thought that coming up with a project for every language I was interested in would be prohibitive, and if I’ve never used them before, how would I even know what a good project for a language might be?
So to break out of my analysis paralysis, I decided to start the HelloLanguageproject as an exercise for myself: to write Hello World, Fibonacci, FizzBuzz, and possibly a few other very simple applications in every language that interests me. So far I’ve done 17 languages, including Rust, Scala, LISP, and Fortran, and plan to do about a dozen others including D, Go, and Swift.
It’s actually been a really interesting exercise just switching between multiple different syntaxes for solving problems in a single evening. If you have any suggestions for cool languages I should take a look at, a favorite feature of a language I should explore, or small exercises I could do in multiple languages to highlight their differences, please let me know in the comments!