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Which programming language do you want to learn next?

edd.me

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Re: Which programming language do you want to learn next?

#41

Post by strlen »

nostrademons wrote: post #17
cageface wrote: post #15

No more new languages for a little while. New algorithms and problem domains instead.

Yeah, I went through the learn-every-programming-language-possible stage in late college and the couple years afterwards. I eventually decided that no language is going to boost your effectiveness as much as knowing your problem domain very, very thoroughly. There's a lot of depth in specialized algorithms that isn't visible to someone in college or a web shop, yet many of the most lucrative startups come from specia…

In violent agreement with you. Specialized knowledge is how you make your way out of the enterprise/web ghetto and onto much more fascinating problems, including in the greater enterprise/web industry: you can think of most of what Amazon does as enterprise software, yet they've used e.g., distributed systems expertise to their advantage; where most saw "class ShoppingCart extends StatefulSessionBean" (and a big fat check for WebLogic and Coherence) they saw http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.h...

However, I remember a comment you've posted once on this site (don't have the URL) saying there are no shortcuts to being a programmer: i.e., you should learn several programming languages and you should be a competent algorist. Some languages also force you to think differently about algorithm design (e.g., purely functional data structures), which is always a good thing.

Re: Which programming language do you want to learn next?

#44

Post by fharper1961 »

StudyAnimal wrote: post #33

Javascript

Me too. Because now it's possible to use Javascript on the server as well as the client. I think that for small teams doing Webapp development, being able to use the same language on the client and the server is a big win.

Re: Which programming language do you want to learn next?

#45

Post by hyperluz »

Spark & Ada just to see if the language and associated tools and processes are really practical (read fast development with low bug rates and easy to mantain code) and secure.

Scheme to learn functional programming and see if this paradigm really implies in good reuse of code.

Agda to learn about intuitionistic type theory.

Re: Which programming language do you want to learn next?

#47

Post by vedang »

strlen wrote: post #40
neilk wrote: post #18

Scala. I want the power of types and functional programming and Actor concurrency, but am leery of doing anything practical with languages like Erlang or Haskell. Plus, Scala runs on the JVM and is thus compatible with all of Java's libraries. The day I have to read a UTF8 string backwards I want to use some standard library, not get creative with a linked list of ints. Plus plus, the Lift framework looks pretty grea…

> doing anything practical with languages like Erlang or Haskell Why do learn it for a specific reason? Why not learn a language to expand your mind? Scala is awesome, but Haskell will help you make use of some of its more powerful features. By all means, learn both. Erlang is interesting and is quite practical too (albeit Scala tends to be practical in more kinds of problems: there many times where you want an easie…

I don't have an opinion about erlang or scala, but I agree with the poster that it is important to do something practical with a language. How will you learn the concepts that a language tries to teach you without actually building something non-trivial in it?

Re: Which programming language do you want to learn next?

#48

Post by [deleted] »

ftrain wrote: post #3
aboodman wrote: post #2

Go - It's a little thing, but I'm enchanted by its implicit interfaces. Seems like it'd be very nice for testing and for decoupling components.

Agreed, although I recently realized I likely need a better understanding of C to fully understand where Go is going. (I'd also like to spend time with Lua--it keeps showing up in interesting places.)

[deleted]

Re: Which programming language do you want to learn next?

#49

Post by vedang »

ftrain wrote: post #3
aboodman wrote: post #2

Go - It's a little thing, but I'm enchanted by its implicit interfaces. Seems like it'd be very nice for testing and for decoupling components.

Agreed, although I recently realized I likely need a better understanding of C to fully understand where Go is going. (I'd also like to spend time with Lua--it keeps showing up in interesting places.)

+1 for Lua. It seems to be the most "different" language I keep coming across.
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