programming languages

It’s that time of year again. Programmers everywhere are wondering what skills will be most valuable in 2011 and what is the best programming language to put valuable time and effort into learning now.

There are many ways to look at the question but here’s a good analysis from Rob Diana incorporating Tiobe rankings, info from the Dataists, charts from indeed.com and SimplyHired and other sources like Stackoverflow, Google searches and GitHub projects. Hint: Lua, R, Clojure, Go, Erlang, Scala, Groovy, Scheme, ActionScript come out on top of this admittedly personal list.

We did a post around this time last year asking what the best programming languages to learn for 2010 would be; it’s interesting to compare the two lists.

Check out this great gallery of websites featuring the 3D functionality of HTML5. If this one doesn’t make you laugh I don’t know what will. I have often linked to galleries in the past that feature websites created with Flash, CSS3, or any number of other technologies, because I think there’s value in observing what people are making on the cutting edge. Not only can web developers and graphic designers be inspired to go further in their own creative process, there’s a good chance that you’ll see something (especially when it comes to web programming) that you didn’t even imagine as possible beforehand. There’s no better recipe for inspiration than that, I think.

While we are on the subject of HTML5 here is the most interesting example of HTLM5 video I have yet seen.