Languages I Want to Learn

I’ve fallen off the wagon of late in learning “a language a year” (as The Pragmatic Programmer advises). I have a long list of languages to learn, but I thought I’d try and narrow it down to a top five. Here goes:

  • “Io”:http://www.iolanguage.com/ – the more I work in OO the more I am drawn to prototype-based OO; and all the Io code samples I’ve seen are beautiful.
  • “Smalltalk”:http://www.squeak.org/ – one of those languages I feel like I already know from many years of tangential exposure, but it would be nice to be able to build a real app in it.
  • “Scala”:http://www.scala-lang.org/ – learning Haskell left behind a lingering itch to play with powerful type systems that help rather than hinder, and Scala seems like a pragmatic environment in which to do so.
  • “Clojure”:http://clojure.org/ – the early buzz is growing on this one. Good documentation for a young language, and I like a lot of the design decisions.
  • “PROLOG”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog – the only language in this list which would actually expose me to a programming paradigm I am not terribly familiar with.

7 comments

  1. Don’t try to learn a language a year. Just be curious, and you’ll average about that. I would add octave to your list, if you ever do any math beyond the trivial, and ml if you’re interested in a paradigm that you’re really not familiar with. ml is interesting in that it’s pretty transparently the inspiration for scala’s syntax.

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