Ask HN: What should be my next programming language?

4 pointsby nithinbekalvor 16 Jahren25 comments

I am trying to decide what programming language to learn next. Couldn't think of a better place than HN to ask for recommendations and start discussions about programming languages.

I've worked on ruby/rails for over a year, so that's the language I'm most comfortable with, but these days I work on C and PL/SQL. I'm trying to pick up a language that's very different from the ones I've worked with. Here are the languages I'm considering:

Erlang/Haskell/Common Lisp: Understanding functional programming would be a challenge, coming from ruby's object oriented world and these languages seem the top contenders in that category.

Scala: It's has both object-oriented and functional features, so will it be easier to catch up with functional programming in Scala than with a purely functional language like Haskell?

Smalltalk: It would be fun to learn a language that's been around for over three decades and has had so much influence on the design of other languages.

Any other language? Clojure? Go? Brainfk? ;-) Tell me what language you think would be most interesting to learn and why you recommend it?

10 comments

sophaclesvor 16 Jahren

I vote for haskell. There are a couple of great online resources for free[1], and if you are at all like me, you'll benefit immensely from it, even though you never use it directly. Basically it is so weird that you have to learn new ways to think. The cool thing is those weird things end up being applicable in boring ruby/python/c type situations. Also, you start wishing everything had a badass type system, because you start seeing problems that could easily be solved by codifying them to ADTs and letting the type system sort out the rest.

1. Learn you a haskell for Great Good -- http://learnyouahaskell.com/

Real World Haskell -- http://www.realworldhaskell.org/

nithinbekalvor 16 Jahren

I've taken a look at those resources. In fact, I even read a bit of Learn You a Haskell and tried writing some code.

And yes, I am not looking for a language that I will use on a daily basis. If I wanted to build something now, I will pick ruby because that's the language I know best. Instead, I'd rather learn a language that makes me write code differently.

Thanks for the advice. :)

timrobinsonvor 16 Jahren

Haskell is probably good for a C programmer since the non-pure parts -- IO and the foreign function interface -- are C-like. By contrast, the other languages mean the OP would learn a new runtime environment as well as a new language.

I can definitely recommend Haskell for expanding your mind and making you look at familiar languages in a new way.

Skywingvor 16 Jahren

If I decide to pick up a new language, it'll probably be Scala. My only real reasoning for that is because the language is younger, which just seems more exciting. Now, if I could just find time or a reason to start using Scala then that would be awesome. :)

nithinbekalvor 16 Jahren

Yeah, Scala looks exciting, and from what little I've seen of its syntax, it looks different enough to be interesting. Plus there's an excellent online book that I could use to get started with it.

runT1MEvor 16 Jahren

Scala also hits the sweet spot of both new but usable in production. Linkedin, Foursquare, and Twitter all have significant portions of their apps written in Scala.

I'd be a little more hesitant about creating a production app with Haskell, though it's been done.

mcavvor 16 Jahren

I'd recommend Clojure for two reasons: You'll get experience with functional programming, and you'll be introduced to the JVM at the same time. If you learn Clojure and later want to learn another JVM language, you'll be halfway there.

nithinbekalvor 16 Jahren

My past attempts at understanding Clojure have failed badly. (I must say I didn't try that hard, though.) Would a foundation in Lisp make it easier to learn Clojure?

mcavvor 16 Jahren

Nah. Find a good book though, like The Joy of Clojure or Programming Clojure to get you through the fundamental bits.

skeltoacvor 16 Jahren

I picked up Erlang a couple of years ago because I needed to hack on a Jabber server. Never mind the functional aspect; Erlang stands out for concurrency, distribution, and fault tolerance. Several of my Erlang projects have been running, at scale, trouble-free for months. I get a kick out of never getting service alerts.

Lisp is another good answer to your question. It's different. And the cliché is true: even if you never use it, your coding will improve if you understand Lisp. (Land of Lisp is a fine primer.)

However, with Erlang it has been much easier to find actual projects to do.

nithinbekalvor 16 Jahren

Thanks for the recommendations. A lot of people are suggesting different functional programming languages here -- Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, Scala and Lisp. I'm becoming more and more interested in learning Lisp before trying the other languages. What do you think of such an approach? Would it help me understand Erlang/Haskell/Clojure/Scala better in the future?

skeltoacvor 16 Jahren

I am just now getting into Lisp so I can't say how learning it would affect subsequent language exploration. Functional programming is good but if it's the most interesting part of any language, that would be a boring language. Erlang's functional style and pattern matching syntax were novel but the immutable bindings, process spawning, and message passing made it interesting to me. In Lisp, I am interested in S-expressions and macros (and wishing it had those other Erlangly bits I mentioned!).

stonemetalvor 16 Jahren

Factor, it is a stack based language that is fairly different from the rest of the stack based languages(it counts lisp as one of its major influences. ) It has a good standard library that includes both a web framework and a GUI framework.

jmenuvor 16 Jahren

Other than the language being different, what are your goals in learning a new language?

nithinbekalvor 16 Jahren

The main reason I'm looking for a new language to learn is so that I could understand programming concepts better. I took up electronics in college and then moved to software development, so my foundation in programming isn't very good. That's what I'm trying to change.

jmenuvor 16 Jahren

I also had three years of electical/electronics in college before I started programming. I have been a java developer for eleven years and just recently started programming in groovy. Both of these are native to the jvm and have extensive apis for client and web programming. The grails framework which harnesses the power of groovy, spring framework, and hibernate is like rails in concept but it is its own. If I didn't know these languages, this would be my next move.

nithinbekalvor 16 Jahren

Please correct me if I am wrong here, but isn't Groovy/Grails too similar to Ruby/Rails and Python/Django to make it much of a challenge to learn it? How different is it from Ruby or Python?

pdelgallegovor 16 Jahren

Have you think about learning how to write your own programming language. It would give you a deep understanding in topics that would make you appreciate other languages.

If you do the exercises till the metacircular evaluator in SICP book it will teach you Lisp and about how to develop a naive lisp-1 interpreter. Its a great exercise.

nithinbekalvor 16 Jahren

I've wanted to read the SICP book, but do you think the book may be too advanced for someone who knows next to nothing about Lisp and functional languages?

pdelgallegovor 16 Jahren

I think is ok, if you already know how to program. The SICP book is not the easiest book ever, but is also not that complicate. SICP teach you many things, not only lisp. YOu can also follow the lectures in the MIT open course web[1].

If you dont feel comfortable with the SICP book (many people dont like it), you can start with How to Design Programs(HTDP)[2]. It teach scheme/racket, and is one of the better books to teach programming that I've seen, and the people in the mailing list and irc channel are very friendly.

The good thing is that both of them are free[3], so you can take a look and see if the fit your expectations.

[1] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

[2] http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/

[3] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

nithinbekalvor 16 Jahren

Thanks for the advice. I'll take a look at both of them and choose the one I'm more comfortable with. Both the books look quite interesting.

mian2zi3vor 16 Jahren

Learn a dependent-typed programming language like Agda or Epigram or Coq.

nithinbekalvor 16 Jahren

To be honest, I had to Google those names to find what the languages were like. :) Those are definitely going into the list of languages I would like to take another look at some day.

HackrNwsDesignrvor 16 Jahren

I'm going to try RoR, I hear it is a lot of fun, and as a programmer I want to have fun with my work :)

nithinbekalvor 16 Jahren

Yeah, developing applications with ruby and rails is a lot of fun. It's easy to pick up the language, and once you know the basics of rails, building complex web apps becomes incredibly easy.

[deleted]vor 16 Jahren