Next Language to Learn?

Warner Onstine — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 17:36:50 -0700

Definitely looking for feedback on this one. On my previous list I used to have the following as the next languages to learn and play around in. Of course the only true way to learn a language is to find a project to do in it (but I’ll figure that one out a bit later).

In no particular order:

Python
Ruby
Groovy
Objective-C

I went ahead and nailed Groovy (well still working on it but I have learned a lot in the short time I’ve dived into it). I still have my Programming Ruby book (and my Rails book) but haven’t had a chance to dive into those yet. Really would love to compare Groovy’s meta programming with Ruby’s in the near future. Python is still kinda on the radar, but mostly to learn how to manipulate tuples. Objective-C sits above Python for the moment.

Recently though some new (and not so new) languages have entered my list:

Erlang
Haskell
Scala
Smalltalk/Squeak (specifically with relation to Seaside)

Here are some others that I might look into given the right impetus:

Lisp
OCaml - not so sure about this one

Functional languages are all the rage right now, so it would be good to know why ;-). And Erlang and Scala both have Web frameworks that look interesting (Erlyweb and Lift respectively). Being a Web programmer I would like to investigate these as well.

What other languages are out there that would be good to learn? Why?

BlackBox : Tag functional

Next Language to Learn?