Why Study Programming Languages?

Hello! Since you are here, you are probably wondering why, indeed, is the study of programming languages a worthy pursuit. “What’s in it for me?” you may be asking. Fear not, there are benefits.

Professional Benefits

Studying programming languages will help you be better at your job, make more money, and be a happier, more fulfilled and more informed citizen, because you’ll learn to:

Choose the most appropriate language for a given task. A programming language lets you express computational tasks in certain ways. Some do a great job expressing some kinds of tasks and do a terrible job at others.
Learn new languages more easily. Thinking in terms of language independent concepts (e.g. types, sequencing, iteration, selection, recursion, concurrency, subroutines, parameter passing, naming, scope, abstraction, inheritance, composition, binding, etc.) rather than in one particular language’s syntactic constructs enables you to adapt to any programming environment.
... Mastering more than one language is often a watershed in the career of a professional programmer. Once a programmer realizes that programming principles transcend the syntax of any specific language, the doors swing open to knowledge that truly makes a difference in quality and productivity. — Steve McConnell
Use the languages you do use more productively. If you know how and why a language was designed, you can:
- choose the best way of doing a given task
- utilize some of its non-obvious powerful features
- simulate useful (and powerful) features from other languages if your language lacks them
- write elegant code
- understand obscure features
- understand weird error messages
- understand and diagnose unexpected behavior
- understand the performance implications of doing things a certain way
- actually use a debugger effectively
Design your own language. There are many good reasons for creating new languages to solve problems (see this essay by Tom Van Cutsem). Even if you never create a complete language, you might need to write your own little language as part of a larger application, for example:
- A query language for database access
- A query language for a search engine
- A calculator
- A console interface to an adventure game
Encounter fascinating ways of programming you might never have imagined before. Experience the enlightenment of actually understanding pattern matching, type inference, closures, prototypes, introspection, instrumentation, just-in-time compilation, annotations, decorators, memoization, traits, streams, monads, actors, mailboxes, comprehensions, continuations, wildcards, regular expressions, proxies, and transactional memory.
Exercise: What is a monad? What is a continuation?

Social Benefits

Studying programming languages may even enable you to:

Understand and participate in exciting academic and professional discussions, both at meetups and online.
Socialize with researchers in linguistics, programming languages, and people interested in communication.
Understand inside jokes, like this one, this one, and this one.
Gain a little fame, and perhaps make a difference in the world, with a programming language you design yourself.
Impress your friends with esoteric, geeky, fun, and sometimes arcane knowledge. Though try not to let any accumulated hipster cred to go your head like this person:
I write world-changing applications in languages you have probably not yet heard of. My code is poetry, meanwhile yours is oh-noetry.
— Hipster Hacker (@hipsterhacker) March 6, 2011