Which programming language do you want to learn next? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by strlen » Fri, Nov 19, 2010, 12:37 PM UTC

vedang wrote: post #47

strlen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Oh you can certainly build non-trivial things in the language. It's just you may not be able to use it for a work project (for different reasons). This is what I meant by practical: software that you build at work and that operations will deploy or sales will sell.

There's tons of practical applications built in both Haskell and Erlang: erlang has rabbit mq (I have some criticisms of it, but they're not related to the language it's built in), Haskell has XMonad (the window manager I use on a daily basis). Both are very practical.

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

#52

Post by gtani » Fri, Nov 19, 2010, 12:55 PM UTC

baguasquirrel wrote: post #9

Agda. Just for shits and giggles.

agda, coq, epigram, ATS (dependently typed languages)are mentioned regularly by haskellers.

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

#53

Post by joubert » Fri, Nov 19, 2010, 12:55 PM UTC

OCaml

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

#54

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Nov 19, 2010, 1:04 PM UTC

hanula wrote: post #24

It's strange but after Python I don't feel like I need/want to learn sth new.

Same here. It's a local maximum.

However, I am forcing myself to learn Clojure. There must be other maxima in this space.

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

#55

Post by john2x » Fri, Nov 19, 2010, 1:08 PM UTC

C or C++. Has been for a long time. Never got around to it. Maybe OpenFrameworks will make things more interesting.

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

#56

Post by balakk » Fri, Nov 19, 2010, 1:10 PM UTC

I'm learning making my own. This is the first time I'm seriously muddling through parsing and lexing. I want to make at-least a toy-language interpreter.

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

#57

Post by gtani » Fri, Nov 19, 2010, 1:11 PM UTC

all the ones mentioned by the panel(io, rebol, factor, forth, ...

http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-1...

I'm not actually going to learn any of them, i'm going to find some URLs that say why they're different from the ruby/python/java/c* maelstrom

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

#58

Post by spacemanaki » Fri, Nov 19, 2010, 1:40 PM UTC

hanula wrote: post #24

It's strange but after Python I don't feel like I need/want to learn sth new.

Careful... http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

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

#59

Post by petercooper » Fri, Nov 19, 2010, 1:42 PM UTC

gmac wrote: post #50

petercooper wrote: post #46

JavaScript. But properly . Yegge was right, I believe. It's going to be the language that defines thks decade, for sure.

Ditto, but via CoffeeScript, and with node.js/socket.io.

Yeah, JavaScript is running the risk of turning into the new C++ with all of these dialects and subsets ;-)

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

#60

Post by HamletDRC » Fri, Nov 19, 2010, 1:43 PM UTC

trezor wrote: post #6

F#. It should let me get my mind around a somewhat different approach to programming compared my main languages (C#, Javascript) while letting me still work with a know platform.

+1 for F#. it is a really great language and I learned a ton by spending about 250 hours with it. The book Expert F# is a really good resource. the first 200 pages are about the language (a complete guide) and the rest is just case studies of .NET junk. I wish they had made 2 books not one... 1st 1/2 is excellent though and worth buying.