This year, I am currently torn between:
-Haskell (to go full blown functional crazy) -Smalltalk (to go full blown object crazy) -Javascript (to finally write some stuff for the web/browsers) - Java (to sell out and lose the will to live?)
Any advice is more than welcome. I'm probably looking for the "programming language that changes the way you think" aspect, since I've already got a paying job...
PiL will present examples that will change the way you think in several different ways, which you will then be able to leverage in any other programming language (most of the time, depending on how restrictive the language is).
I'm trying to revisit statistical modelling and pick up some machine learning basics over the next year.
or what about domains barely related to computer science, but where coding is an invaluable skill, like medicine/genetics, manufacturing, or aerospace?
consider how many programming languages your average person knows (zero). now consider how many you know. is it objectively worth your time optimizing around that particular dimension within your skills, or are you perhaps suffering from a latent bias you have from the fact that you are a relative expert in programming?
would you rather have a carpenter who knows how to use a dozen hammers, or a wide variety of tools? is haskell a new tool, or is it just another hammer for you? with coursera you have no excuse to avoid stepping outside your comfort zone!
There's a danger in what you're suggesting, in overgeneralizing and never learning too much about one topic. Would you rather have a carpenter who's an okay carpenter, an okay musician, an okay actor, and an okay racecar driver, or a carpenter who's really good at carpenting?
Your answer to this topic is only interesting if you explain why. Even a very brief explanation will do. As it happens, I've never heard of Elixir. Try to make me curious enough to google it.
In my case, I'll likely not try to learn any new language this year. But I am going to brush-up on the mathematics that has gotten rusty over the years. Partly because I used to like math, but now rarely get to use anything beyond basic algebra. And partly to position myself better to help my kid with homework.
I had great learning it. I usually pick up languages fairly quickly, but Haskell eluded me for more months than I'd care to admit. There is a great community of very smart and friendly people who helped me on IRC, and a couple of pretty good books -- http://learnyouahaskell.com/ and http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.html.
I enjoyed the experience, and I certainly feel like a better programmer for it. But damn I felt daft for a few months!
- Java. My first real programming language, learned in college, used for a year and a half in enterprise work and Android, got pretty good at it, but I learned
- Objective-C for making iOS apps and I never want to write in Java again. I'm also learning C just to understand Objective-C more but I have no plans building anything with C.
Basically, my current interests/goals for learning a new language are:
- Develop a new way of thinking.
- Learn some great engineering practices.
- Build products (software) that solve real-world problems. I'm not likely to learn a new language if I can't build anything useful with it, that can potentially sell and make it as a consumer startup.
- Become full-stack. I can already easily build an iOS app (I have no interest in building responsive websites) but I find myself still having to rely on something like Parse. Which isn't so bad though because it saves me so much time.
I guess that narrows my choices down to: Ruby, Python, Go, or something else, but I'm not in a position to identify which poison is best-suited to me. I just want one that I can be really good at and meet most if not all of my goals. Any thoughts?
You cannot go wrong with any of these. So have a look at code samples and spend some time browsing the web-sites about all of them then choose the one that appeals the most to you.
One app: web, windows, mac, linux. I know that can be done with other tools too, but this is the one I've chosen. I like SQL too: old guys like weird tools!
"Machine" language - this is anything turing complete that's close to the hardware, ie that forces you to think about and understand the underlying circuitry. Candidates: Assembler, C.
Static/Imperative "Object" language - put this one off for as long as you can, for it is easy but not simple, and will ensnare your mind with the belief that you are special because you are among the elite priesthood of programmers who can grasp levels of complexity mere mortals dare not even dream of. Down this path lies years of frustration, all in service of the darkside. Chances are that this category will be forced upon you first, by naive, shortsighted fools who little realize the evil they are spreading. Learn only what you need to disable the tractor beam and escape with the Deathstar layout, so that when the time is right a well planned rebel assault may remove this abomination from the universe.
Candidates: there are no candidates here, as that implies choice. One of these languages will be heaved upon you whether you like it or not - C++, Java or Visual Basic (if the darkside is particularly strong in you).
Dynamic "scripting" language - this is for that category of problems where most of the needed abstractions are well understood and well tested. Using them should involve as few words as possible.
Candidates: Ruby, Python, Perl, Lua, bash (or any bourne shell derivative).
And finally, what should be every programmer's last language,
A "language" language - these are usually known as Lisps, but I think both Alan Kay's original bootstrapping Smalltalk and Forth are acceptable here. The key feature is having a small core of concepts that can be infinitely composed into higher abstraction commands that are treated no differently from the compiler's perspective. Once you have this power, all of the interesting behaviours of languages like Haskell, Erlang, Prolog, etc, are available to you.
Candidates: Scheme/Racket, Common Lisp, Clojure, Smalltalk, Lisp.
Having learned perl, ruby and python (these are all incredibly similar), and then Clojure, I've found that I really like the functional paradigm. It helped drag my attention back to thinking about data structures and functions to act on that data a lot more than a ton of bad OOP examples ever have. I'm actually excited to program now instead of feeling like, "Okay, this mess of classes I'm making is going to pay off some day..."
One negative/positive is that I now kind of recoil in distaste when I find OOP-y code that's seemingly done for the sake of jamming code into a class instead of using generic functions and data types. It's funny that there's a large swath of not so useful monad tutorials, because there's an absolute mountain of examples of classes/objects that don't make any sense at all. I didn't mean to make a tiny rant on OOP. Sorry about that.
As someone who has been using a lot of dynamic languages, I'm really interested to find out how a static type system can help me program better software.
- Ada : everybody raves about it but nobody uses it ;-) - Python : for everyday hacks, it's portable, simple and it's not Java ;-) - Assembly : it's the root of everything - C : my mind is overflowing with Arduino projects - C++ : I'd love to create ISX extensions and make private bots for some MMO - Prolog : just because
I will probably settle for Ada if John Barnes publish its book at the beginning of 2014.
I think there's a lot of interesting ideas around high availability and fault tolerance to explore in the Erlang world, and I'd like to tap into that.
