What’s The Best Programming Language To Learn In 2011?

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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.

Here Comes Digital Banking

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We did a post a while ago on BankSimple, the soon-to-be-live online digital bank that’s promising a totally new way of banking, with better customer service, greater emphasis on mobile banking and fewer fees. I think there’s a huge market for a different way of doing things in retail banking-how about you? BankSimple’s launch comes sometime in 2011, but they have launched the preview site where you can sign up for a beta account. Stay tuned, I’ll definitely be reviewing my BankSimple experience.

Update:  I’ll be watching this even closer than I had planned to when I originally wrote this post a year ago; it seems that the general unhappiness with large banks that has led to the Occupy movement has positioned Bank Simple–which is now known simply as “Simple.com“–very well if they execute properly.