With a new year upon us, it’s a time to examine the big questions: what is the best place to buy lottery tickets? Should I buy a puppy? But seriously, the sands of tech are changing rapidly so everyone should be looking to expand their repertoire, as in ‘what programming language should I learn next?’
H3rald.com has a great article on 10 programming languages worth checking out right now: Haskell, Erlang, Io, PLT Scheme, Clojure, Squeak, OCaml, Factor, Lua, and Scala. This is no halfhearted end-of-the-year “10 best” list, it’s a thoughtful and informed overview of the pros and cons of each language. The author is opinionated but frank, admitting that in the case of Haskell for instance, some of the more difficult concepts such as monads are still beyond his grasp. Very lively debate in the comments as you might expect from those wounded by the idea that their favorite esoteric languages would be left off.
Each of these top programming languages has a “To get you started” set of links; this is definitely an article to refer back to over the holidays, assuming you get any time off. I know I always appreciate meta- commentary and this is extremely well done.
Also, here’s something interesting: what about creating your own programming language?
The article gets bonus points for using the word “didascalic”. Who knew? (Wow, that word damn near exploded my voice activated typing software…)