Ask HN: what language should I learn next? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

#21

Post by manny » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 4:29 PM UTC

No Perl fans here?

Shame. :(

I, then, humbly suggest Perl. You might like it, and with your Ruby background it shouldn't be hard to pick up.

Re: Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

#22

Post by kenver » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 4:34 PM UTC

I'm not sure you really need to "learn" another language, if you can program in one you can probably get by in another quite easily given a bit of practice and some documentation.

I think it would probably be worth learning new algorithms or trying to tackle problems which are totally out of your area of expertise if you really want to learn something new.

If you really want to learn a new language you could look at VHDL, and start designing some hardware! I did this myself as part of my research degree and its quite interesting to program code that gets implemented on hardware.

Re: Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

#23

Post by sophist » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 4:36 PM UTC

j2d2 wrote: post #6

Anon84 wrote: post #5

Hindi! Everything will eventually be outsourced to india, anyway. Seriously though... Python is probably the best option, followed closely by Java.

Hindi! Everything will eventually be outsourced to india, anyway. Please keep this kind of thing off HN.

Exactly. For maximum outsourcing utility you should learn Kannada or Tamil instead.

Re: Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

#24

Post by mechanical_fish » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 4:41 PM UTC

ricree wrote: post #17

Perhaps you are asking the wrong question here. Instead of learning a new programming language for web apps, maybe you ought to try programming a type of application that is new for you. I think that taking a go at something like a client-server, embedded, mobile, or desktop application would help broaden your perspective and abilities more than simply learning a new language would.

Yep. I would learn Objective C and write an iPhone app.

Or I would say to heck with it and learn Lisp.

Why focus on a pragmatic language for web apps? You've got that already.

Re: Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

#25

Post by volida » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 4:49 PM UTC

"who has a month to spare to learn another language?"

Re: Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

#26

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 4:50 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

#27

Post by ccwu » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 4:50 PM UTC

How about Chinese? Probably more useful.

But seriously, python is well regarded and with G App Engine as a possible hosting platform using it, you can also learn more about design for hosted infrastructure apps.

Re: Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

#28

Post by wilkes » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 5:01 PM UTC

Languages every programmer should at least have some understanding of:

Lisp - because it's lisp, duh Smalltalk - to actually understand OO Prolog - it requires a completely different thought process, for better or worse Haskell - for understanding useful type systems and functional programming C - because it as low-level as you should ever need

Just my 2 cents

Re: Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

#29

Post by cypress-hill » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 5:06 PM UTC

haskell without a doubt

haskell is on the edge of almost every interesting trend in programming tools.

parallelism? check STM? check closures? haskell is closures functional programming? better than any other lang continuation style? check type inference? check good library support? check (kinda) repl? check etc etc

Re: Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

#30

Post by wastedbrains » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 5:07 PM UTC

I played around with Scala and thought it was really interesting.