What programming languages are a waste of time to learn?

There are literally hundreds - possibly thousands of languages out there.
All but a few are used either very rarely, or not at all.

Some were designed to be useless (Brain****, Whitespace - which are intentionally almost impossible to write code in) - some were made for theoretical purposes only (subleq - the simplest programming language possible which only has one instruction) - some were interesting ideas but of little to no use (Befunge is a two-dimensional programming language). Some are for extreme niche applications (NQC is only used for programming Lego robots!).

Some have aged so badly that they are confined to very small, dying niches - you probably shouldn’t bother learning APL, Snobol or COBOL. BASIC has also kinda gone the way of the Dodo too.

Honestly, you have to look at the tasks you want to undertake - or the career path you intend to follow - and pick the few languages that seem most useful.

Most programmers will (at some time) need to make a webpage - so JavaScript makes good sense for nearly everyone. If you plan to write games, then C++ and C# would be important to you. If you’re making web servers then you’ll need PHP (I feel very sad when I say that - PHP is horrible!) If you want to contribute to the Linux kernel - then you’ll need to know C. If you want to get into banking and accountancy - then maybe you DO want to learn COBOL, but certainly Java should be on your short-list. Python is a good language to learn if you want to put code together quickly, but execution speed is unimportant.

There is a reason why there are hundred of programming languages…the world actually NEEDS the capabilities of at least half of them.

But it all depends on what you’re going to be working on.

If you NEVER want to work on web servers - then by all means avoid PHP like the plague.
If you don’t see yourself ever writing high performance code - probably don’t bother with C++ because it’s *so* complicated.

If you’re never going to be a 3D graphics engineer - you probably won’t ever need GLSL and/or HLSL.

If you’re never going to work on projects for the US military - by all means skip Ada.

As a working programmer, I probably know 10 languages well enough to sit down and start coding without looking at a book: C, C++, C#, GLSL, HLSL, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Java…at least a few more. I’ve learned at least 30 languages over my 40 year career - typically only just well enough to get some particular job done…some that I was once good at (Pascal, Ada, FORTRAN, Algol-60, various assembly-languages) I’m so far out of practice that I’d have to re-learn them!

So expect to get good at learning new languages - you’ll be doing that quite often. I can probably pick up enough of a language to write code in just a few days…but to get good at it takes much longer.

Source: https://www.quora.com/What-programmi...-time-to-learn

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