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What Programming Languages Should You Learn Next?
simoniker writes "Over at Dobbs Code Talk, Chris Diggins has been discussing programming languages beyond C++ or Java, suggesting options such as Ruby ('does a great job of showing how powerful a dynamic language can be, and leverages powerful ideas from Smalltalk, Perl, and Lisp') but suggesting Scala as a first choice ('Very accessible to programmers from different backgrounds.') What would your choice be for programmers extending beyond their normal boundaries?"
The question is flawed. Anyone worth their weight as a programmer doesn't care what language they .NET) which are a deveation of Procedural Based Languges (C,
.EQ. 1) THEN
... ...
program in but. But Programing Methodoligy should they work with. Assuming that you use to
Object Orianted Languages (C++, Java,
Pascal, FORTRAN). So after knowing those methodoligies perhaps you should study functional languages
(LISP, SCHEME, HASCAL) or Logic Based Languges (Prolog).
Procedural and Object Orianted languges tend to have the most programmers and is widly used
Functional comes next used in some Sciencetific applications as well handling a lot of AI type stuff.
Logical Lanagues are used less frequently because it is very tight sometimes too tight to expand into
a full application.
But most good programmers with experience in these languge classes are not normally worried about what
to program in. They may have their personal favorates but, can code sucessfully in any language
even if they never coded in it before. Because once you understand the classes the rest is just a
google search from finding the right command and syntax of the languge.
For example some differences between procedural Languges
FORTRAN
IF (X
END IF
VB
If (x = 1) then
end if
C
if (x==1) {
}
Python
if x == 1:
BASIC
IF ($X = 1) THEN
END
Wow there are 5 different languges and they all look simular almost anyone would be able to figure it out
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I seem to be at odds here with this mentality.
... whatever's under the sun for application container and all the while I'm trying to be an expert at Maven (which seems limitless) and Ant so I can do a decent job building. Not to mention the UI aspects: JSF, Tiles, Javascript, AJAX, DHTML, JSPs, JSeamless, Flex, GWT ... they just go on and on.
Stepping outside your comfort zone is a great thing if you have the time or need to do it. Me, I learned scheme & lisp, prolog, a number of instruction set languages and various scripting languages in my undergrad. Because I needed to see what it was like in realms other than Java & C++.
However, these days, I spend my free time looking at frameworks for the latter two languages. Do I want to know Ruby? Sure. But it's not going to make me better at my job. My employer has me jumping from JBoss to Weblogic to Websphere to Jetty to Glassfish to
I hate to say it but this specialization programming and time spent with other people's frameworks and libraries seems to make me more valuable in my own realm. You're right, it's a good idea for me to pick up Ruby (or whatever I'm supposed to learn next) because Java is not going to be around forever. But honestly, I feel a lot of people around me could stop re-inventing the wheel week after week at work and just take a couple days to tweak someone else's solution to work.
That said, Lisp & Prolog were my most favorite and least practical languages I've learned (I think Lisp stands for Lost In Stupid Parentheses).
I guess my answer to your question just another question: "What is your motive for learning a new language?" If it's to broaden your view of the world, go with something out of left field. If it's to be more valuable or better at what you do in Java, C++, Pearl, etc then I would actually tell you to start learning how everyone uses those languages.
Honestly, a lot of the older coders I know just don't have the time. The company will both pay for and tell them what they need to learn next or they ain't learning anything at all.
My work here is dung.
We really have some obscurity-loving masochists among our ranks.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
I'm surprised there was no mention of Python. I think Python is a good language to know. It seems to be used a number of places and forces people to write easily readable (and therefore maintainable) code. And I thought it was pretty easy to learn, especially if you have OOP experience.
Slackware
I learned BASIC back in the days of the C64. I then learned Perl when I decided to try my hand at bioinformatics. I picked up C++ at the same time. But there was one language that was used regularly there that always made me feel like a fool.
SQL.
Everything about it seemed backwards and inside out to me. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around "accountant-speak" and "normal forms" (still not sure WTF that means). Yet i know it will likely be in my future. Too much data resides in tables now, and too much data interpretation comes down to data(base) mining. Even the perl::sql modules couldn't save me completely.
So I would say, if you plan for a career that is data-driven, learn SQL if you haven't already. It certainly doesn't seem to get easier to pick up as you wait longer - or at least it hasn't for me.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I hear that COBOL is a pretty good language to learn. It isn't new, but it is old enough to make a comeback (like disco, aviator glasses and big hair)...
You're right that if you know one C-style language you know them all, and in order to expand your development skills you should learn other styles of languages. However, a major problem is that there aren't so many references for non-C-style languages as there are for C(++), Java, Python, and Ruby. Though Lisp is something all developers should encounter, most Lisp books on the market are antiquated. (However, thank goodness for the relatively modern Practical Common Lisp by Seibel.) I wish there were more tutorials out there for the exotic languages that might really teach you new tricks.
FORTH learn to want I would why?
My advice would be to learn formal verification techniques. These can be applied across languages and across platforms. If you deploy them properly you can reduce your defect rate from 50 per 1,000 statements to 2 per 1,000 before the first test case is run.
That will save you far more time than the latest over-hyped platform. While everyone else is fixing bugs in their application, you've already moved on to greener pastures. It will increase your capacity to build really good quality software and not get in to flame wars over nonsense. Nothing quite ends an argument over style more than saying: "Yes, but can you prove that your approach is correct? I can."
Simon
Even if you never use it commercially, the background it gives you in terms of hardware will improve your ability to write efficient code.
Personally, I think this should be the first language that future programmers (as opposed to CS graduates) should learn.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I think Whitespace is worth learning, if only to be a smartass on exams where the prof specifies you may use "any" programming language. Just leave it blank, then after the exam spend a few hours figuring out how the hell you would solve the problem in whitespace, and bring a proof of concept on a USB flashdrive to fight the inevitable incorrect grade you receive for the problem.
I have yet to find the courage to actually attempt this. . .
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
So don't use code snippets without understanding them. Just because you can find fewer doesn't mean perl is bad language to learn first.
I have only learned perl, and am quite content with it as it does the jobs I need it to. I haven't been using it for 5-7 years, but I look back on code from 3 years ago and it's no less secure than anything I write now. I decided to understand any code snippet I used.
I think Perl is a fine first language as long as you start simply, and expand giving yourself time to take in the concepts. Enjoy the exploration.
I can't speak in comparison to any other languages obviously, but it worked for me.
http://use.perl.org
The fact that you think "mindless syntax" is the only difference between lisp, haskell, and c shows that you should probably learn one of these languages.
Verilog is a hardware description language, not a programming language. It may look like a high-level language -- wire assignments look like variable assignments, module instantiations look like function calls -- but conceptually it's completely different. Furthermore I don't know how applicable it's going to be for anyone who works in software design, which is the audience this question seems geared towards.
Because what Yoda would use is it.
Like a lot of people have commented on this thread, it's past time for you to learn a functional language. I'm not sure if it is true, but new CS students at MIT used to have to learn Scheme as their first language. Learning a functional language will transform your programming ability.
I recommend the book The Little Schemer This book is like no other programming book you have ever used. It is a socratic dialog between you and the interpreter. Questions on the left, answers on the right. It is meant to be used with an interpreter.
Once you make it through this book you'll be a much, much better programmer. You'll also have an easy time learning languages like Haskell, which is used quite a bit in academia and is useful for real world software.
So buy a copy of the Little Schemer and download an interpreter, Dr. Scheme is pretty good, and get cracking.
This seems to be the future. Are there any languages that are more efficient for multithreaded programing?
FPGA != CPU
It's a programming language for programming a type of CPU called an FPGA.
It's not. It's a hardware description language, so can be used in FPGAs, but is equally used for ASIC designs.
Furthermore, an FPGA is NOT a CPU of any kind. It's a configurable logic chip. You could program it as a CPU, but it's not one until you do.
Write your own language... it's certainly more educational.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Don't forget Piet. That's produced some of the most beautiful code I've ever seen. It also handles abstraction in a novel way.
My work here is dung.
It's great for handling matrices, vectors, plotting and umm... well, that's all it's good for.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
If you're looking for books on LISP, another book to consider is On Lisp. It's free to download from the following link as it's inexplicably out of print.
http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html
This is a great example of mods and commenters (i.e. GP, currently modded informative) who don't know what the hell they're talking about. Parent post is correct -- while you can use Verilog for programming an FPGA (field-programmable gate array), Verilog has many uses in hardware design. It's called Verilog HDL (hardware description language) for a reason. Here is an overview of Verilog for the uninitiated.
Nice to see Assembly at the top of your list. There's something to be said for learning some form of assembly.
after learning C++, Java and a few others I decided to get into Microprocessor and Microcontroller programming and did so in whatever flavor of assembly the chip supported. I gained an entirely new respect and understanding about how these chips work on physical level as well as a much greater understanding about how inefficient most applications are and the enormous potential for improvement, as well as the enormous potential of modern CPUs and how much that potential is squandered on what people actually use them for.
I've developed a number of embedded applications now and the way I think about other applications has really changed too. My next language will probably be Verilog because the price of FGPAs has dropped significantly and they are incredibly versatile tools if you know how to use them... some of the things I've seen people use them for are mind boggling
Collector's Edition
But I think a really good language to learn is ECMAScript or to the layman, Javascript.
Javascript is the language of the future. It's such a powerful language and so underrated. It's far beyond the whole switching images thing. It's an interpreted langauge deployed on more computers than any other programming language. (think web browser.) It's light, it's fast, it's dynamic. For a scripting language it offers you an extremely familiar syntax, C like. It's becoming the backbone of other environments, and other compiled / interpreted languages are being extended for scripting support.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
And a powerful macro system. Scheme's is interesting, and you can do most anything with it, but certain things require a great deal of hoop-jumping.
Aside from conditions and restarts, macros seem like the last thing that hasn't sneaked into popular languages yet. For the uninitiated: imagine being able to write a function that, at compile time, takes and returns entire syntax trees. Or imagine if the C preprocessor let you write #defines that were full-fledged functions that had the entire language and runtime available during expansion.
Imagine if C let you hook into the tokenizer and the parser! Why, you could invent your own language for solving your problem, and then solve your problem in that language!
It's worth learning Common Lisp just to play with this stuff.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
I'd suggest erlang for its own sake -- a parallel programming model that doesn't suck as much as threads with locks.
Disclaimer: I don't actually know Smalltalk (Squeak won't run on my machine), Prolog, Verilog, or Scheme. I did learn Lisp, once upon a time.
Also: I think that while we do have languages that are good for specific tasks, every language I've tried is missing something I consider to be critical.
Sometimes I'm able to bring it in -- with JavaScript, I can almost emulate Ruby's iterators (each, collect, etc). But sometimes, it's something more pervasive -- for instance, while most languages support some kind of threads, they often allow supporting libraries to be written in such a way that they break when used in threads, and some of my favorite languages (Ruby, Python, Perl) don't support real OS threads actually running in parallel. (Python has a Global Interpreter Lock, and Ruby seems to be about to adopt the same, meaning that a single process of each won't be able to really take advantage of multicore/multiprocessor systems.)
Sometimes, these things are mutually exclusive -- how do you have a purely-functional, lazily-evaluated language, and also make it simple and imperative? But most of the ones I care about aren't -- there's no reason a language like Ruby couldn't be written to be fast, bytecode-compiled, and truly threaded. There's no reason a language like Erlang has to have non-variable variables and ass-ugly syntax.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I can think of several good reasons why a beginner should learn Perl:
* It is easy to learn. Don't listen to what the Python advocates tell you. There are lots of good tutorials out there on the web.
* It introduces you to syntax which is similar to other well-used languages such as C and Java. If you're going to do Perl, you're probably doing CGI, and then moving over to Java and J2EE isn't as hard as learning it from the start.
* If you learn Perl first, then classic shell languages such as bourne shell, korn shell, etc., won't be so cryptic when you need to modify or write one (and you will need to at some point). Many of Perl's built-in variables are the same as what you'll find in those shells.
* Regexes - nearly every language out there has them now, but Perl has for a long time been the leader in regexes. In my opinion, Perl's regex syntax along with the Perl culture itself encourages their broad use. When you learn regexes from Perl and you move to another langauge that has libraries for them (e.g. Java or C#), you'll find support for them but you will also find that long-time developers in those languages won't use them as much. If and when they need to use one, and they know you're into regexes, they will come to you to ask you how to construct them.
* Windows API Support - outside of Microsoft only products, Perl's library of Win32 modules is virtually unmatched by other scripting languages. Although they have them, languages like Python and Ruby don't even come close in this area. This is important because someone starting out with a programming language will often be starting out on Windows, not a *NIX platform. If you are a Windows sysadmin trying to break out of VBScript and move on to better things, then Perl is for you.
* Lots of legacy systems in production today use Perl. I was in a company once that hired some Python biggots, who wanted to convert all the programs written in Perl code to Python (and get paid for it -- har har), but the IT manager wisely kept them in check. Perl is ported to almost every flavor of *NIX out there, and then some, and on many platforms it is part of the default install package. (Sun OS is one that comes to mind.) If you know Perl, you're useful when you come across it.
* Quick and dirty scripts. Sometimes you need something that you can use quickly and throw away. Perl is perfect for one liners executed at the command prompt and for multi-line utilities. Plus, there is instant gratification that comes from creating useful one-liners, kind of like an endorphin rush.
*shudder* Arrgh.
Javascript is not a nice language. It has all the features you say... but most of them are broken.
Dynamic everything? Yup, it's got that. Except that its primary data structure, the Object (an associative array, basically) coerces all keys into strings. This means that if you try to use another object as a key, it gets coerced into something like "[Object:0x12345678]", and that string is actually what's used... with hilarious results if you actually want to use the keys as anything other than simple hashes. Yes, this happens with numeric keys in arrays, too. And since all the data storage classes share method and data namespaces, which means you can't combine named and numbered items in an array without running the risk of overwriting the array methods.
First-class functions and methods? Yup, it's got that... with some *really weird* semantics when it comes to 'this'. Basically, if I have a function foo(), I can call it in three ways: foo(), object.foo(), or new foo(). Each way, the function gets called. 'this' gets assigned differently in each one. In the first, the current value of 'this' gets propagated into foo(). In the second, foo()'s 'this' gets set to 'object'. Yes, this means that these two lines behave differently:
(The new foo() case is still pretty strange, but at least it's consistent with what you'd expect.)
C-like syntax? Yup, it's got that... but C-like syntax is entirely unsuited for a dynamic language like this, because a C-like syntax implies C-like semantics. Like var. var defines a local variable, right? No, it doesn't, it assigns a new value to the current object context. Which means the value remains valid after it looks like it's gone out of scope. Don't believe me? Open up Firefox's error console (in 'Tools') and try any of these lines:
(The answers are 1, 2 and 4.) If you're used to C, C++, Java, C#, D, or any of the other horde of Algol-based languages, Javascript *lies* to you.
The fact that Javascript has closures is its one redeeming feature, IMO.
The thing about optional semicolons is pretty horrible, too. Try writing a parser for it some time.
If you're interested in dynamic languages, of which Javascript is one, I'd strongly suggest checking out Lua; it's way faster than Javascript, it has all of its features implemented in rather more consistent ways, and is so tiny that one person can understand the entire language (library included) with ease. I do most of my programming in it these days.
(I agree with all your other language choices, BTW; although I'd add Forth to the list as an example of a radically different low-level procedural language, and I'd emphasise Smalltalk more. Smalltalk is a beautiful language. All the shiny new language features people are rediscovering today, Smalltalk had in 1980. Concurrency, dynamicism, polymorphism, extreme programming, closures... it had 'em all. And nobody noticed. It's a shame...)
You might want to check out Io.
What is a CPU and what is a programming language? From a comp.sci. point of view, the input language of anything that can execute any algorithm, that is, that is turing complete, is a programming language.
Proof that an FPGA is turing complete:
An FPGA can emulate any set of gates and interconnections given a description of these as input.
A normal processor, e.g. a Z80 is a set of gates and interconnections.
Thus, an FPGA can emulate a Z80.
The Z80 assembler is turing complete.
Anything that can emulate something that is turing complete given the right input, is turing complete.
Thus, and FPGA is a turing complete machine and its input a programming language.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Maybe you should have been +5 Funny, but not +4 Insightful.
An FPGA might very well be able to do very little. See Adrian Thompson's page, especially his 1990s work on evolving FPGA circuits.
'An FPGA' could be a very limited device.