Trumptor

That's a good one. It was even funnier to me because I thought I worked out what the integral of x was after reading the beginning of the joke. Since I hadn't done any calculus in years, and thought x^2 and to negate the 2 when taking the derivative I'd have to add a 1/2 to it so it would be x squared over two! I thought to myself, "I still got it". Then I read the punchline and felt pretty dumb for forgetting that any constant would also be dropped when taking the derivative, lol - the waitress kicked my butt too.

I agree with you Sensei that having only one language would impede progress. I think that if there was only one language, it would be more rigid and would evolve slower, but with so many competing languages, where there's a fault in one language, the next will look to address the issue - Java was made to improve on C++, C# was there for developers that wanted more from Java (allowing pointers again), etc. I think the most taught languages are C# and Java by far.

I think there is a difference in the type of languages used, but little differences in the languages used for a certain purpose. For example, C#, Java, Ruby etc. are programming languages with the same basic function and by learning one you can easily switch to another. ASP.NET and PHP are more focused on webpage development and require a different understanding. Oracle and SQL programming deal with databases and have a different setup and learning curve as well.

I don't see why you'd say it's necessary to declare a variable at the beginning. If it's a global variable, then yes, you'd want to declare it outside of a certain method or class, so the scope covers where it's appropriate, but if you need to use a variable in a "for" loop for example, you declare the variable right there (e.g. for(int x=0; x<10; x++)). If a variable is only used in a particular method, you wouldn't need to declare it anywhere else except within that method. I agree with the poster that said it isn't as important to understand a particular language as it is to understand the concepts since they are used across languages. In object oriented programming (OOP) languages it is important to know what a class, object, instances, inheritance, etc. are, and it doesn't matter much if you are programming in C#, Java, or any other OOP language, the idea is mostly the same and it comes down to mostly syntax differences.

I think Java and C# are pretty cool languages.