You seriously state that new, languages more or less in an alpha or beta phase, like Rust and Go can be compared to C/C++ which has 30+ years of development behind them, including amazing libraries like the STL and Boost, not mentioning the thousands of libraries and frameworks that are available all over the web?

I'm not sure I agree with this, I know there's a huge "Learn a new language at least every fortnight to grow your beard enough to compete with the other flannel wearing, home-brewing, bearded kids at your local food truck", but at the same time I feel there's great value in sticking with a language that's generic enough for lots of stuff, and learning the ins and outs of it. But I'm a C++ nerd, so I guess I can blame myself for loving a language (including the STL) that is nearly impossible to grasp fully.

I do agree that it's great to learn a couple of languages, but when going through university, they pushed one language per course: Java, C++, C, C#, VB.Net, Lisp/Scheme (hurraaah! I might mention that it was quite dead at the time, but lo and behold, the Zombie arises!), Prolog, JavaScript, MatLab, perl, html/css, LaTeX, etc. Python hadn't exploded at the time, nor had Haskell (hence the Scheme I guess, but it was in an AI course, where Scheme was still commonly used, according to the professor).

Sure, some of those languages are just variations of the same thing, and it is easy to learn the difference when knowing one of them, but constantly switching language was more confusing than rewarding. We also constantly had to learn a new framework for doing stuff, which often had us struggling more with the actual language and the proper way of using it (which was probably off by a mile anyway) than focusing on the problem at hand.

I agree that knowing a couple of languages is great, and I don't count XML, HTML/CSS, LaTeX, etc, as languages, but one or two compiled OO-languages (C/C++/C#/Java) combined with a scripting one (Python? Perl? Bash? Perhaps I shouldn't compare Bash to Python... :) ) and a functional one is probably enough for most people. But that might just be because I suck at Haskell, and I'm bitter.

A friend/colleague of mine goes on daily rants, screaming "Why can't everybody not just program in C++?! It's the best language there is, there's no need for other languages!", but I wouldn't go that far ;)

Well, after writing this, I've noticed that you actually wrote "a number of languages" which can be interpreted as the exact same thing I just wrote. Well, to heck with you all!

Thank you. I'll turn off the lights when I leave.

You just can't resume afterwards...

And you have to do the Qt 4 dance while saying it.

But what does women use? Not to mention REAL women?

I don't like pee in my soup, so there is less pee in my soup than yours.

Hehe tell Adobe that.