C++ = you can never stop learning darn thing, it is still growing.
Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?
81–90 of 94 posts
Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?
#82Objective-C and the iPhone API. This is probably the first language I learn just in the process of doing something specific (writing apps for iPhone), and not because I really need to learn it for enhance my programming skills. Still it is an interesting language even if designing it today from scratch could lead to something pretty different...
Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?
#83Javascript. I've "known" it for 10+ years, but now I think is the time to take it seriously. The web stack is getting dumber as a lot of UI and logic moves to JS inside the browser. Databases got dumber in exactly the same way -- do you know or care if your database has good stored procedure support? Eventually it won't matter much what the server is running.
+1. It's just getting faster and faster as it becomes the focus of the browser wars, and it's not a bad language, really.
Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haskell for me too. It's slow going, but it's already making me a better Python programmer in my real work. OCaml/F# are on the back burner too.
> making me a better Python programmer in my real work. I found this too. Once I started reasoning with lazyness, Python's generators felt a lot more natural. The itertools module is very useful.
Haskell's let... in... construct I use heavily now, I don't miss multi-line lambdas now.
Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?
#85Clojure.
Me to, knowing a little scheme definitely helped, watching all the SICP lectures last summer also helped(If you don't have time for the book, the videos are a good way to cheat).
Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?
#86None. I've got enough of them. What I need to get better at is maths, signal processing, and graphics. Chiming in to reject the idea that we should spend our careers churning through languages.
Learning another language can mean learning yet another slightly different syntax and API, but sometimes it means learning a fundamentally different model. Learning Erlang's concurrency model, logic programming, or something completely different like K can be a real eye opener, even if you don't use them directly.
I've been learning Prolog over the summer* , and while I'm not convinced I will make much use of the language directly, it has some really interesting ideas, which are largely usable in Scheme and Lua. For example, I also have a much better understanding of how unification, type inference, etc. work now -- Prolog is a DSL for that sort of thing, and having a good notation helps, much like knowing regular expressions changes the way you think about patterns.
* Via Sterling and Shapiro's _The Art of Prolog_ (which is an excellent text, IMHO) and the relevant chapters of CTM (all the more so).
Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a bookworm, so I sought out well-regarded books on Amazon. I started with 'PHP and MySQL Web Development' by Welling & Thomson, and could not have been happier. It's hefty (nearly 1,000 pages for the latest edition), but was well worth the time. Next up was 'PHP in Action', which is similar to the later chapters in Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python (one hell of a book, btw) and was coauthored by Chris Shiflett. I'v…
Did you know OmniTI (employers of Shiflett and Welling, former employer of Thomson, and sister company to MessageSystems (Wez Furlong & George Schlossnagle) have an office in Brooklyn? I believe the main contributor to CakePHP works there too. If you're that interested in PHP, it might be something to consider being relatively close by. I'm bookish in how I approach programming too, and among your list have read "PHP…
I didn't know OmniTI had an office up here. I definitely have noticed diminishing returns from all the PHP reading; I still find it satisfying, but I'm not sure how long that'll last. Thanks for the 'Extending and Embedding PHP' recommendation. Any other recommendations (especially non-PHP ones) are welcome. 'me' at the first domain in my profile.
Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would not advise this style of programming, because it creates a very tight binding between the application logic and the interface. In fact, it's exactly the problematic style caused by GUI builders that generate event handlers and ask you to fill them in.
I think clojure's use of higher order functions is very well suited for this. With only a "#" in front the code becomes a lambda function. This pretty much makes the whole concept of handler functions void - or at least trivial. But I'm not sure if it will work out in the end... and I mixed this with liberal use of metadata and thrown away SQL too... mostly I try to go as far as I can and see where I trip. It's fun.…
OK, now you want to develop a desktop version of your application with a snazzy graphical interface. Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?
#89Potion, _why's experimental language. It's cool to play with something bleeding edge, though something about the language itself makes it feel like Python. Maybe the use of colons to define functions/blocks.
Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?
#90Playing with Erlang - I like its approach to errors and parallelization. Plus the idea of a functional language with Prolog-like pattern matching seemed like a cool idea.