Haskell instead of anything else. And then some Factor.
Mandarin is a nice touch. I'll try that. Indians, however, speak English pretty well -- even if their accent might take some getting used to.
4 Languages you should learn in 2009
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: 4 Languages you should learn in 2009
#12Reminds me to break out my russian books ... I'm getting rusty
Re: 4 Languages you should learn in 2009
#13I'm surprised they didn't mention arabic with mandarin and russian at the end.
I just took an informal survey amongst my teammates (including Arabic in the list), and "three out of four" developers said: Mandarin. The interesting thing is that on my team, two are from Russia, one from China, one from Lebanon, one from the UK, and one from India. The other two are Americans.
Classic essay: "Why Chinese is so Damn Hard"
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
"Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility."
Re: 4 Languages you should learn in 2009
#14I recommend checking out Ruby instead of Python.
Out of curiosity, could you elucidate why?
Python and Ruby are pretty equivalent in terms of what you can do with them. Given a choice between the two, I'd probably choose Ruby, as I personally find it to be less cognitively dissonant than Python.
I'm really not fond of having to haul the self parameter around all over the place in Python, and there seems to be some confusion between what's a function and what's a method. (Some of this is being addressed in Python 3 I think.)
The whitespace thing, I can just about cope with, but I always miss the colons off the end of lines. Oh, and at least on Windows, the supplied documentation is organized in a seemingly arbitrary manner (but at least it has an index if you know what you're looking for).
Having said that, Python probably has a better standard library than Ruby, so, meh, learn both and see which you prefer.
Re: 4 Languages you should learn in 2009
#15"It is one of two official languages used at Google and it does power a lot of their most profitable products." One of 2? I thought 4: Java, Python, C++, Javascript. And does it really power a lot of their most profitable products? Like which? (Not bashing here, Python is my main language and I love it.)
Haha I thought Google has only one profitable product, AdSense :)
That said, a number of their high profile apps are in Python, most notably YouTube and App Engine.
Re: 4 Languages you should learn in 2009
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just took an informal survey amongst my teammates (including Arabic in the list), and "three out of four" developers said: Mandarin. The interesting thing is that on my team, two are from Russia, one from China, one from Lebanon, one from the UK, and one from India. The other two are Americans.
Classic essay: "Why Chinese is so Damn Hard" http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html "Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five year…
Classic Moser essay. I thought this would be a post about spoken languages as well, and would put mandarin at the top of the list as well. Since people are still hiring here (especially in tech related fields), I will happily take this opportunity to plug our Chinese learning product:
The ability to roll your mouse over the characters and see exactly what they mean, or just change all of the characters to pinyin on-the-fly makes it an incredibly effective way to learn Chinese.
Re: 4 Languages you should learn in 2009
#17"It is one of two official languages used at Google and it does power a lot of their most profitable products." One of 2? I thought 4: Java, Python, C++, Javascript. And does it really power a lot of their most profitable products? Like which? (Not bashing here, Python is my main language and I love it.)
To be blunt and disrespectful, after seeing the author confusing Cantonese and Mandarin, I am quite skeptical of the assertions.
Re: 4 Languages you should learn in 2009
#18I recommend checking out Clojure instead of Erlang.
Clojure comes close to answering almost all of my complaints with other languages. - The mature libraries and deployment environment of the JVM. So your code runs fast, runs almost anywhere, and a lot of work is already done for you. - Data literals for arrays and maps. One of the shortcomings of Common Lisp. And catches up with (surpasses?) Python/Ruby/Javascript in this regard. - ISeq interface means that a single…
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Re: 4 Languages you should learn in 2009
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, could you elucidate why?
Python and Ruby are pretty equivalent in terms of what you can do with them. Given a choice between the two, I'd probably choose Ruby, as I personally find it to be less cognitively dissonant than Python. I'm really not fond of having to haul the self parameter around all over the place in Python, and there seems to be some confusion between what's a function and what's a method. (Some of this is being addressed in P…
"..but I always miss the colons off the end of lines"
Well, if you miss them so much, just put them in.
Re: 4 Languages you should learn in 2009
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python and Ruby are pretty equivalent in terms of what you can do with them. Given a choice between the two, I'd probably choose Ruby, as I personally find it to be less cognitively dissonant than Python. I'm really not fond of having to haul the self parameter around all over the place in Python, and there seems to be some confusion between what's a function and what's a method. (Some of this is being addressed in P…
"..but I always miss the colons off the end of lines" Well, if you miss them so much, just put them in.
Yeah, that's what the interpreter says... :(