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Ask HN: Which programming language should a journeyman programmer learn?

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Ask HN: Which programming language should a journeyman programmer learn?

#1

Post by blueslurpee »

Hello HN,

I'm looking for some advice and/or enthusiasm on which programming language you might recommend to a young journeyman programmer looking to broaden their horizons beyond the mainstream imperative stock.

As some background: Like many from the past decade, I was introduced to programming and cut my teeth via Python, and while it holds a soft spot in my heart for its lovely syntax and idioms (personal preference), I am growing weary of chasing down run-time errors in production and the squishyness of its type system (or lack thereof).

From there I've followed along the well-trodden path of imperative/OO languages one would expect to become acquainted with during the "standard" CS education, namely C & Java, along with some Golang thrown into the mix. I adore C for its close mental alignment to the computer's operations, and while I appreciate Golang and Java and have no great qualms with either, they don't scratch a certain itch.

My daily driver at work is Typescript. I find writing vanilla js to be generally objectionable.

I would classify myself as a competent journeyman, and I am really looking to branch out and broaden my perspectives. I'm not sure what itch it is I'm trying to scratch, but I'm looking for an enthusiastic community and a language that brings a lot of "joy", if that makes sense. I'm not looking for any commercial benefit out of this, but hey, if being an expert in the lang is highly profitable, that's also a data point.

A good type system might be where my interests are first piqued, but it's not a hard requirement. Similarly, my mind jumps to Functional Programming, but purity is not a requirement either.

So, if you're an experienced vet, found yourself in a similar situation beforehand, have been having similar inclinations, or are just a fanboy/girl for your specific lang, please share your thoughts!

Should I be wrangling data functional-style sans types with Clojure?

Playing around with the BEAM with Elixir/Erlang?

Diving into Scala types and the Akka framework?

Jump into the deep end with Haskell?

Try my hand at Rust and systems software?

Ocaml, a language I know nothing about?

I have formal CS training, so I'm not overly intimidated by the more "academic" languages.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Re: Ask HN: Which programming language should a journeyman programmer learn?

#2

Post by eternalban »

(You should prepend "Ask HN:" to your post's title.)

This almost sounds like language as an 'intellectual pet' type of motivation, which is ~somewhat at odds with "broadening my horizons". Why not explore 'new [advanced] things to create' in one of the most fun languages you already know? Or, get excited by exploring a dimension such as 'performance', or 'distribution', etc.

So, my 2c is first decide if you want to be a linguist or a writer.

Re: Ask HN: Which programming language should a journeyman programmer learn?

#3

Post by laumars »

Sounds like you’ve already done a fair amount of homework yourself. Threads like these are often just an excuse for people to preach their own personal preference so I think your should use your own experiences and future projects to guide you.

But if you’re really after a recommendation, then I’d suggest either go for a functional language (like a LISP, Scala, OCaml, etc) or a low level systems languages (like Zig or Rust). Or even one that overlaps with both domains?

It really does just depend on what you want to do next though. Nobody else can tell you that.

Re: Ask HN: Which programming language should a journeyman programmer learn?

#5

Post by blueslurpee »

eternalban wrote: post #2

(You should prepend "Ask HN:" to your post's title.) This almost sounds like language as an 'intellectual pet' type of motivation, which is ~somewhat at odds with "broadening my horizons". Why not explore 'new [advanced] things to create' in one of the most fun languages you already know? Or, get excited by exploring a dimension such as 'performance', or 'distribution', etc. So, my 2c is first decide if you want to b…

Edited.

And fair enough point. To use your analogy, this question is more of the "linguist" side.

If I were solely interesting in the "writer" side, I would be building distributed systems in Go.

Re: Ask HN: Which programming language should a journeyman programmer learn?

#6

Post by blueslurpee »

laumars wrote: post #3

Sounds like you’ve already done a fair amount of homework yourself. Threads like these are often just an excuse for people to preach their own personal preference so I think your should use your own experiences and future projects to guide you. But if you’re really after a recommendation, then I’d suggest either go for a functional language (like a LISP, Scala, OCaml, etc) or a low level systems languages (like Zig o…

Thanks a lot. The general hope of the question, was in that there may be people like me on HN who had a similar itch at around year 2-5 in their career.

In general, it's a low-risk decision, because it's only for personal enrichment. But time is precious at the moment and it would be quite a good bit of fun to hear from some people that simply ~love~ their language.

I know, I know.. questions like this can sometimes lack rigour and lead to a simple cheerleading fest, but I was hoping for a relatively lighthearted thread.

I am also convinced this is not an isolated feeling on my part, what I mean by that is, I'm sure this is a relatively common phenomenon among younger engineers who enjoy CS in and of itself, and I would be very interested in hearing what they have to say.

Thanks for the Zig recommendation!

Re: Ask HN: Which programming language should a journeyman programmer learn?

#7

Post by jim-jim-jim »

Haskell is the "deep end" in terms of its ideology, but not difficulty. In practice, I've found compromise languages like Typescript and Scala more challenging because they're everything to everybody. If you already enjoy the benefits of types and want to explore that avenue further, then Haskell makes more sense than some of the alternatives.

Re: Ask HN: Which programming language should a journeyman programmer learn?

#8

Post by drKarl »

So, since you mentioned Java, Kotlin and Groovy are very pleasant to write and quite easy to learn, lots of syntactic sugar. I'd say Kotlin is a better language than Groovy. Scala is a very deep language to learn, lots of fascinating features, just reading Programming Scala is amazing and totally recommended. The learning curve is steeper to get to more advanced concepts but it is worth it. Rust is not as difficult to learn as Scala, not so many features and concepts but it's a bit difficult to wrap your head around borrowing and lifetimes mostly, and some of the smart pointer stuff. I wouldn't recommend lisp or derivatives like Closure etc mostly because of the parentheses. It is said the last 3 pages of the code that controlled the Soviet nuclear launch codes written in Lisp are just ending parentheses.

To scratch your itch of broadening your horizons and learn lots of amazing features that don't exist in the languages you know (Python, JavaScript, Typescript), I recommend Scala

Re: Ask HN: Which programming language should a journeyman programmer learn?

#10

Post by blueslurpee »

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #7

Haskell is the "deep end" in terms of its ideology, but not difficulty. In practice, I've found compromise languages like Typescript and Scala more challenging because they're everything to everybody. If you already enjoy the benefits of types and want to explore that avenue further, then Haskell makes more sense than some of the alternatives.

Insightful comment. In general I prefer tools that have a prescribed way of looking at the world and don’t try to be everything to everyone. That said, I feel a certain allure to the depth and “wizardry” that I’ve heard so much about in Scala, which doesn’t generally fit this mold.

So at the moment I really think I’m stuck between Scala, Haskell, or Elixir.

It’s tempting for people to simply say, “Learn all of them” but for practical reasons that’s not possible at the moment. So thanks a lot for your comment.

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