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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?

#61

Post by sofuture »

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…

Erlang comes from industry and design has been driven by use... that's pretty practical.

Your point about the JVM is solid, but it would be a mistake to dismiss a language wholesale with a cheap dig because you hear that "string handling sucks". :)

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

#62

Post by jcromartie »

Smalltalk.

Yes, really. I think the potential for a really sexy open source Smalltalk is there with Pharo; it just needs a lot of work. But building web apps in Seaside has really convinced me of the productivity you can gain by tossing out certain ideas and embracing a very focused and principled environment like Smalltalk (focused in the sense that it's the only place I've seen OOP taken seriously; i.e. it's not "OOP, but...").

I'm a big big fan of functional languages, especially Clojure, but the fact is that UIs are stateful and OO design really works there, and users need UIs.

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

#63

Post by djhworld »

vinc wrote: post #39

Ruby. My favorite language is Python and I really like Django but I think I'm missing something by not learning Ruby and Rails. Haskell is the other language I want to learn, and probably more than Ruby but I'm currently looking for a job and RoR is the better choice...

Ruby and Rails are largely independent entities (in my opinion)

Learn Ruby first, Rails is a huge framework to start out ruby programming with.

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

#64

Post by dkersten »

hanula wrote: post #24

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

In my experience a lot of Python programmers move on to learning the functional Python features and libraries and then after they get that down, the eventually jump ship to a mainly-functional language (a lot of people seem to move to Haskell, I personally moved to Clojure).

This is based on my own personal experience, that of Python Ireland members and from things I've read or seen (here on HN and elsewhere).

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

#67

Post by jhancock »

jcromartie wrote: post #62

Smalltalk. Yes, really. I think the potential for a really sexy open source Smalltalk is there with Pharo; it just needs a lot of work. But building web apps in Seaside has really convinced me of the productivity you can gain by tossing out certain ideas and embracing a very focused and principled environment like Smalltalk (focused in the sense that it's the only place I've seen OOP taken seriously; i.e. it's not "O…

I've just been writing a small app in pharo the last few days. I haven't used Smalltalk in 15 years and its coming back very quickly. Pharo is nice but it still needs polish to get to the Smalltalk I had in 1994.

For this new app, I am using Iliad framework http://www.iliadproject.org/ instead of Seaside. I started out playing with Seaside but the code base is so large I felt I couldn't understand the internals of the framework without a lot of time invested. The trade off is that iliad has almost no docs and you have to read the source.

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

#68

Post by anarchitect »

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. I've fallen in love with JavaScript again since I've started using it to write applications rather than scripts.

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

#69

Post by jlv »

dkersten wrote: post #64
hanula wrote: post #24

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

In my experience a lot of Python programmers move on to learning the functional Python features and libraries and then after they get that down, the eventually jump ship to a mainly-functional language (a lot of people seem to move to Haskell, I personally moved to Clojure). This is based on my own personal experience, that of Python Ireland members and from things I've read or seen (here on HN and elsewhere).

Do you mind elaborating on what 'functional' libraries exist in python? I've practiced a bit using the whole map-reduce paradigm in different ways in python, but I'm not really sure what you mean beyond that.

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

#70

Post by larrywright »

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.

I absolutely agree - do you know of any good resources for learning JavaScript as a language? Most books are targeted at using it to add whiz-bang stuff to web sites.
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