Tue, 09 Mar 2010

My Next Programming Languages

I’ve been thinking (and talking) about learning some new programming languages over the past couple of years and it seems like time to make a decision about what to tackle. I’m not talking about learning a language just well enough to be able to poke at some crufty code that needs a tweak—what I’m interested in is learning languages well enough to seriously use them. And that, as Peter Norvig says, takes time. Which means I can’t learn every language out there.

After a lot of reading and thinking, I’ve decided that it has to be a functional language and that brings me to Erlang and Haskell. There are, of course, other candidates, but these two seem to offer the best opportunities for me at present, not least because both languages now have what appear to be good books available. And I like learning, at least in the beginning, from books.

It will be a while before I have anything to report about this plan, as I will first need to fit in my reading and practice until I can get something that I define as interesting ready for testing. At this stage, my tentative plan is to work with one language until I can write something easy but useful like a web server with it and then to reimplement the same thing in the other language and see how the two languages stack up.

It might not be a web server, but it will be about that size. And it will be something I don’t need to write (since, to keep with the web server example, I already have mature software handling that task for me), because I want to do this without any time pressure so that I can really delve into it. And it’s quite possible that I’ll just love whichever language I start with and not bother to even learn the other one. I really hope that I don’t hate them both, but I’m ready for that outcome too.

Posted at: 16:18

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