The sum of all knowledge

It seems to me that pretty much every paradigm in programming is probably present in some form in one of the following three languages:

• C++
• Perl
• Common Lisp

That makes me wonder if it’s worth studying those three languages to try to have access to the interesting ideas that other smaller languages tend to specialize on.

Programming Language Bundles

These days I often find myself trying to come up with sets of languages that would cover all the application domains that I am interested it.

One bundle that I have often considered is C++, Python, and Haskell. I don’t know that it deals with every area as well as the above combo of C++, Perl, and Common Lisp, but there are some nice overlaps semantically between the languages. I find that I can use a sort of hybrid Haskell and Python notation as a pseudo-code that I can then translate into C++.

There’s enough overlap between Python’s default data structures and STL data structures in C++ that I can mostly mechanically translate a simple Python program into C++.