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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?

#81

Post by petercooper »

larrywright wrote: post #70
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.

I've found that http://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/e54i9/what_is_cu... is worth a read for book recommendations. Most of them are on Safari too :-)

Rebecca Murphey's jQuery Fundamentals is awesome (and free!) too once you get onto jQuery: http://jqfundamentals.com/book/book.html

And I know you already know about this, but posting for the benefit of others, but.. http://javascriptweekly.com/ ;-)

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

#82

Post by nostrademons »

BCM43 wrote: post #73
cageface wrote: post #15

No more new languages for a little while. New algorithms and problem domains instead.

How would you go about doing this? Are there good books?

The Good Books depends upon which specific field you go into. The first step is to pick a field that you're interested in. This is often the hardest step, because from a 10,000-foot level, you often can't tell what will be interesting, and whichever field you dive into will shut off various other opportunity costs.

Then, go to your favorite graduate school website. I'm partial to Stanford and MIT, because both put up fairly complete syllabi on the web, including textbooks and often homework assignments. Pick out a couple courses, just as if you were back in college, and note down the textbooks.

Then go to Amazon.com (or Amazon.co.uk, when I was in college Europe had much better textbook prices, I dunno if they've closed that loophole) and search for those textbooks. And when it pops up "Related books" with good ratings, add those to your cart as well. Buy them.

Read, rinse, and repeat. Many textbooks have generous citation indexes that you can use to find further books or papers to check out.

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

#83

Post by stephen_mcd »

jlv wrote: post #69
dkersten wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

itertools, functools.

I once read a quote that when you're using itertools frequently enough in your Python code you're one step away from jumping to a language like Haskell.

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

#84

Post by dmoney »

roel_v wrote: post #30
neilk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm boggling at the concept of doing PHP "the wrong way". Only small, single-paradigm languages can ever do things "right". With PHP you can do almost anything, in ways that are almost not wrong. ;)

I guess the author means 'using php to for writing web apps that are not a index.php file, a file called 'includes.php' and a couple of files called 'header.php', 'content.php' and 'footer.php' which then have functions called 'printHeader() { echo " ... " etc. }'. Basically, the way php application were written 10 years ago. I consider that the 'wrong' way to use php, but it's how it's (necessarily) taught so many p…

Exactly. What you describe sounds like the one PHP application I wrote, before I had done much real programming.

By "the right way" I mean idiomatic, maintainable, and taking advantage of its strengths.

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

#85

Post by dkersten »

stephen_mcd wrote: post #83
jlv wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

itertools, functools. I once read a quote that when you're using itertools frequently enough in your Python code you're one step away from jumping to a language like Haskell.

I've heard that the OReilly Haskell book was one of the most bought books at PyCon.

My progression went similarly - I started using map, reduce, filter and list comprehension a lot, then moved on to itertools and functools and then decided what I really wanted was a functional by default language. That, the great concurrency support and the desire to learn a lisp-based language properly[1] made me choose Clojure.

It seems that this progression is actually fairly common. I still use Python for quick'n'dirty scripts (especially as a shell scripting alternative) and for web development (for other people; I use Clojure for my own code).

[1] I already knew some Scheme, but never used it for any real projects.

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

#86

Post by neilk »

strlen wrote: post #40
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…

> doing anything practical with languages like Erlang or Haskell Why do learn it for a specific reason? Why not learn a language to expand your mind? Scala is awesome, but Haskell will help you make use of some of its more powerful features. By all means, learn both. Erlang is interesting and is quite practical too (albeit Scala tends to be practical in more kinds of problems: there many times where you want an easie…

I've already dabbled a bit in Erlang and Haskell. I think they are great languages.

Anyway, this was just an expression of interest that Scala might be a better all-around language for getting things done. I have no Scala experience. I could totally be wrong about this.

I should note that I have a particular project in mind that has a web-facing component and multiple nodes on the backend. It's not 100% clear to me that Haskell is the right tool for that job. Erlang could definitely do that sort of thing. But Scala might be more convenient than either.

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

#87

Post by neilk »

merijnv wrote: post #35
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…

Why are you leery of doing anything practical with Erlang and Haskell? #haskell on freenode is filled with people doing practical things in Haskell and Ericsson has bet most of its infrastructure on Erlang...

Scala may be a way to get many of the benefits of Erlang and Haskell while also using a platform that is very successful and well-understood. And if I need to calculate what day of the week it is in 10 days in German, I know some library will exist for this. Scala could be snake oil, but it looks interesting.

I have to come to terms with my own ignorance. I'm not saying there isn't a good date library in Haskell. I'm saying I don't know if there is one, and as long as I'm learning a new language, I might as well choose something where I know at least some of those issues are definitely solved. This may cause some partisans to rage, but when choosing a language for a project, personal comfort is really the #1 issue.

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