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Beating the Averages

For a long time in school I have had the experience of "having to" learn a programming language, and mostly the reason is that "we will be working on a project that requires the use of that language" and, in my opinion that's fair; but sometimes it is because we have to understand the whole picture (like c in operating systems).

In practice the definition of a "strange syntax" has more to do with the fact that it's mostly a syntax that has uncommon elements like lisp, and given that in our course  we are using clojure, a language "based" on lisp's paradigm, we get as a result a very uncommon experience as computer science students.

It also says that usually programmers are "married" with the programming languages that are their favorites, but when you know more than two or three programming languages you begin to get the idea where a language is more effective than the other for certain tasks. For example: recently I started a job in a companny (which ironically is just ceasing to be a startup) that makes some serious data analisys for power consumption in buildings, and they needed to make their data gathering and calculations more eficient and standarized. Also they wanted to stop using software that required some sort of paid licence.

After some successfull research, I came to the conclusion that what they needed was Python, even when I hadn'd used python for a long time I knew that It would have the vast integration that they needed, and when the first project began I realized that the knowledge I got from learning C, C++, and Java, helped me to make a very agile development because I got to know how things where best implemented given by the platorm and the ease of use that python already had.

So, maybe learning a language that's not commonly used or isn't used anymore is really a good practice, and it doesn't have to end there, I think that using a Linux/Unix based OS helps a lot to become a better computologist.

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