What Programming Languages Should You Learn Next? 759
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?"
Wrong Question (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Fortran90\95:
if (x == 1) then
*stuff*
end if
Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Funny)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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PCL is also free at http://gigamonkeys.com/book [gigamonkeys.com] -- I hate to deprive the authors of their royalties, but hey, it's their choice, and helps in making lisp more popular.
Unfortunately, I really can't stand CL's OBNOXIOUSLY-LONG-IDENTIFIERS that other languages often do with syntax. The purported lack of syntax is not a feature when you end up looking like COBOL with more parenthesis (yes that's hyperbole). There are CLOS workalik
Re:Going from C to others is a matter of right boo (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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For productivity, any high level language (.Net, Java, whatever has a lot of libraries)
At the command line, Msft PowerShell is powerful.
The libraries available are really the big thing for high productivity.
Re:Going from C to others is a matter of right boo (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html [paulgraham.com]
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Excellent comment. I'm currently looking at expanding into functional languages. I fail to understand the difference between functional languages and logic languages. Would you help enable my laziness by expounding a bit more on that?
Also, if you have a sciency-type application, could someone recommend a functional language to represent laws of physics (for example) in?
Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Informative)
Logic languages are something different altogether. They provide a framework for defining the rules of a system, then searching for answers which fit the given rules. Logic programming is not useful for general-purpose tasks, but can hugely reduce programming time in tasks which are difficult to solve any other way.
Re:Wrong Question (Score:4, Informative)
Functional Languages such as LISP are like using one Line programs with calling functions for the parameters to get the data.
For Example (ADD(ADD(1,2),3) would return 6
vs
x=1+2
x=x+3
return x
Functional Languages are actually good with AI where you need to make a Tree (using Lists) relitivly easy to try to figure out all the possibilities that you can do.
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Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Insightful)
When I went to school, we were taught all these methodologies. (Though in my case I'm so old that OO programming was too new to be well taught.) I'd hope your average programmer would know them all before getting that first job. Sadly, I get the feeling I am mistaken.
But in general, I'd say, for instance, to use Javascript rather than Lisp as a functional language...not because it is better...not hardly...but because it is very marketable. (And sadly, most people with Javascript on their resumes have no clue it is anything but a Java clone.)
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Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Question (Score:4, Informative)
That might be why they recommend Scala. It is pretty easy to pick up if you know (for instance) Java, you have an "actors" library that is similar to Erlang concurrency, you gain some knowledge of functional programming (though not as much as from a pure functional language such as Lisp or ML, or so I'm told), you can deploy it on the JVM and interoperate with the huge number of existing Java libraries, and you can use existing IDEs such as Netbeans.
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Scala is a functional language (Score:2)
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True, but now let's say you agreed that you are going to program in the OO methodology. Which language do you choose?
There are different reasons for choosing one language over another once you get past the classification of a language (procedural, functional, oo, logical). You will also often find that the industry will gravitate toward what has the cheapest cost for their task.
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It has a funny name, and carries the mystique and credibility you seek. Nothing says "way old school" and "MIT Wizard" like piles of LISP with your tag on them. Of course, you'll have to leave vim behind - there is only one, true tool [gnu.org] for the LISPer, now that dedicated machines like Symbolics are all in the museums.
The opportunities here are boundless - there are whole categories of libraries for HTTP and HTML that simple don't exist yet! If that seems to trivial a challenge, why not look into
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learn to spell (or install firefox2 which underlines textarea typos in red)
methodoligy => methodology
orianted=> oriented
deveation => deviation
languges => languages
widly => widely
sciencetific => scientific
favorates => favorites
sucessfully => successfully
simular => similar
Second,
Never misspell when you code (not comments). Those of us who do know how to spell have to remember which constants, database field names, class names, file names, functions are spelled incorrectly and
Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but the parent comment is a bit "out there". If you had said something like, "Programmers don't care what language they program in, so long as they only want to be coding in one language just like they're coding in any other language", then maybe. But come on... It's talk like that which makes completely mediocre programmers. Do you know how long it takes to become truly proficient in C++ and OOP? Do you honestly want to tell me that you can come from Java (which doesn't destructors, for example) and simply apply your OO Java programming to C++ and be "good"?
Different languages exist because language A does not do what language B does. And, yes, they can contain a ton of the same kind of idea, which is exactly the reason you need to become highly proficient in them to get anything real out of them. You need to explore the differences not the similarities. I have worked with enough mediocre programmers and enough non-designers in my life, thanks very much. I want people to get deeper, very very deep into alternate languages so that they can broaden their thinking, not just their basic language skill set.
Learning a new language has little to do with that language and more to do with learning new ways of thinking. When I interview people that say that have any OO language, I grill them on OO more than I do on the intricacies of Java interfaces or C++ memory management. How you think is much more important to me than how many times it takes you to successfully compile a file.
Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Insightful)
There is another aspect to this.
Just learning a language is somewhat pointless. What are you learning the language for? Some languages do some things better than others. Some languages have entire corners of uses that many people never use.
If you are just going out and writing the same app in a different language, who cares? A lot of web stuff, it is irrelevant whether you use php, java, or whatever.
My first answer to the question "What would your choice be for programmers extending beyond their normal boundaries?" would be "quit writing the same crap".
If you've been writing cgi scripts, write a device driver. And use a language appropriate for it. If you're been writing the newest game that will blow everyone's socks off, write a Database app. Push your goals out there and the rest will follow. Stretch your goals into looking at the end goal and weighing the options in languages to get there. If all you are doing is jumping language to language at the same playground level, you're wasting your time. Languages are just a tool to build something, so build something. Something you have never done before. Unless your compiler is less than 20k in size, odds are you haven't explored a fraction of the versatility of the language you are using.
Bite off more than you can chew.
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Really? What kind of idiot programmers do you work with? My life is finite and my time is valuable. If you don't care what language you program in, you don't care what language you learn, and you must not care what framework you learn either. Heck, all languages and frameworks must be worth learning! Reality check: What kind of languages you spend time to learn, matters.
Much discussion goes into what
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Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed. It's a sad day on /. when I look at purported code examples and say to myself "Hmph. BASIC poser."
"BASIC poser" may be the saddest phrase in the geek sublanguage of the English language.
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Wintermute, is that you?
What Languages? (Score:2)
Re:What Languages? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What Languages? (Score:5, Funny)
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Specialization Versus Breadth (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The interesting part about specializing in libraries or frameworks for a language you already know is that it often shows you how to use the language in ways you never thought of, or thought impossible.
Lately I've been doing a lot of stuff with JavaScript, and mooTools has been a framework I've invested a lot of time into. The first time I remember reading the tutorials, I asked myself "The hell? This is javascript?". After a while, I realized that with mooTools and a little creativity, I could create many
Re:Specialization Versus Breadth (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
By having a breadth of knowledge and skills, you can make informed, smart choices about what language, framework, technology, etc. is best suited to solving your problem. Should your current problem be solved with a "Web 2.0" interface, a rich client application, etc. In your case, you should know what the benefits and downsides of the various J2EE containers are, and in fact, you need to know what using J2EE in the first place is buying you. Make informed decisions that help you solve your problem.
JSP, Servlet, PHP, and Rails programmers should have experience with Java Swing, Java Web Start, and other technologies in order to decide what the optimal solution is -- or at least, the lead developer or senior software engineer needs to have an exceptionally wide range of skills in order to make these kinds of decisions.
My team was stuck for years on a project that was forced into a web application mold (using Java servlets, JSP, Apache Struts, etc.) which caused us relentless headaches for most of the time. It should have been a regular application! A rich client. For many reasons. Unfortunately, at the inception of the project, the project lead had firmly decided that it had to be a web application.
At my employer, I'm constantly learning new technologies to find new and better ways to solve problems. You need to be proactive and take the lead, and solve problems! I had previously been focused mostly on graphics programming, Java application and web programming, but when my project needed it, I learned about embedded programming, embedded operating systems, electronic design, microcontroller programming, etc., on my own. I learned how to do things that no one at the company has done yet, and I have found ways to make our product orders of magnitude better (10x smaller, 10x more battery life, 10x better performance). Since many of my colleagues are focused on their more specialized areas of expertise (e.g., Java application programming, or Java web programming, or functional testing, or database programming, or electronic circuit design), I actually am often frustrated because I have no one to consult with when I have a problem to solve.
You express concern about learning technologies you will never use, but the fact is, that unless you acquire some other areas of expertise, you will never know what is the best tool for the job!
10100001010 (Score:2, Funny)
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Love the 'iPhone' tag (Score:4, Funny)
Brainfuck (Score:3, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck [wikipedia.org]
no Ps (Score:2, Interesting)
Python? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Python? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I won't claim it's perfect, but IMHO it comes closest of any language I have tried to just letting me code up my thoughts. In any language, there is a certain amount of stuff you need to do to satisfy the syntax of the language; for example, in most languages you cannot do anything with a variable without declaring it first. Fans of Python sometimes claim that Python code looks like pseudocode, but with the extra advantage that it
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SQL is next for me (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:SQL is next for me (Score:4, Interesting)
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That depends on the size of your data, and the quality of your hardware and/or indexes. It frequently comes much closer to "Give it to me. When you have a moment."
I understand that COBOL is pretty hot... (Score:5, Funny)
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None of the above... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:None of the above... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:None of the above... (Score:5, Insightful)
My advice would be to learn formal verification techniques.
Over my career, I wouldn't say that languages as such have been a major influence. Developing language-independent formal coding strategies has proven far more important. I've benefited from the writings of Dijkstra (immeasurably), Stroustrup, Iverson, Backus, Knuth, Plaugher, Stepanov, Brooks, Bertrand Meyer (with reservations), and not a lot else. I haven't learned anything profound from Wall, but thanks for all the Onions.
Machine code gave me a good underlying model of the machine. Essential for many debugging situations, esp. back in the day when compilers would often generate faulty code.
APL taught me the value and power of carefully reasoned primitives, the power *and* risk of concision.
C taught me how easy it is to write a loop that's impossible to validate mentally (and then I taught myself how *not* to write such code).
C++ taught me most of what I know about software engineering: programming in the large. C++ manages to be simultaneously better and worse than almost any other language one cares to name. There is a deep truth there that hardly anybody in the industry wishes to accept.
SNOBOL and PL/1 taught me that kitchen sinks are best used for washing dishes.
Perl taught me that it isn't at all difficult to write a complex regular expression that's harder to read than any APL program I ever wrote. I once had to program in APL on a teletype that lacked the APL character set, so every APL symbol was mapped to its ASCII counterpart based on key location. Reading APL code on this teletype was comparable to reading a particularly hairy Perl regex.
PHP taught me that useful code can be written in a language with no coherent center whatsoever.
LISP taught me that the human brain is not a stack machine. I grew up with Mechano. I don't understand the Lego people while all those identical bricks, and I don't understand the LISP people with all those identical cricks.
COBOL taught me separation of concerns: code should be code, comments should be comments.
Python taught me nothing at all. To me Python is just the metric version of PHP, which spares you the headache of guessing which functions calls are in Imperial or American units (roughly as arbitrary as whether a Wikipedia page uses British or American spellings). To be honest, I learned more from playing around with ChipWits many years ago. But I find Python enjoyable for some reason as much as I've used it.
Pascal taught me that the evolution of a complex program occurs along more than a single dimension. I never enjoyed a single minute of Pascal programming.
By far, I learned the most simply from reading Dijkstra (set aside an hour per page) and practicing the art of coding an algorithm in such a way that by the time you are done, your code couldn't possibly be wrong in any profound way, because you have captured the undiluted purity of essence.
Plaugher helped to convince me that computers are *especially* fast at doing nothing. Whenever possible, when a precondition is not met, I just let the code continue, mostly doing nothing (if every statement is coded not to execute in the absence of its precondition, this is an automatic consequence). When the routine completes, I check state variables to see whether the desired actions were accomplished.
I hate exceptions and have never conclusively demonstrated to myself why exceptions are necessary. I suppose to permit integration with code that *doesn't* rigorously guard every statement. I feel confident about my C++ code until the moment I enable exceptions in the compiler. Then I think to myself: this program could potentially fail in 1000 different ways depending on which exception paths are taken. It took the wizards of STL *years* to make the STL fully exception safe. That troubles me. A lot. More than all the other complaints about C++ piled to the moon and back.
Knuth was wrong about premature opt
Re:None of the above... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that it sounds like I'm a shit but in the real world office environment, I'm no where near that pretentious!
That said, this does not detract from my underlying point: In this industry we are constantly told that the next big thing is going to revolutionize programming. We here this a lot about Ruby on Rail at the moment. We're told that if we just choose the right framework and programming methodology we can produce awesome software on time and on budget.
We fall for it every. single. fucking. time. until. words. lose. all. meaning.
The simple fact is that a large part of the time spent in a project is spent debugging the code we just wrote. Debugging is expensive. You typically have entire departments devoted to testing code. In fact, debugging routinely kills entire projects because it turns in to a very costly version of whack-a-mole and people eventually get tired and run out of money.
I am convinced that the key to improving programmer productivity is to get them to write the software correct, first time. It does not lie in a language or programming style.
Verification is not perfect. In my original comment I said that even after formal verification you can still expect bugs. After verification you can typically expect a similar error rate to conventional testing strategies. This is simply because you have to abstract things and you can make errors in your abstractions. Or you might simply make a mistake in your proof.
The point is, verification does not have to be perfect to be better than unit testing. It simply has to find more defects faster. The evidence out there is starting to suggest that it does. Certainly with very large products.
Simon
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I've taken a course on this in university. The tools I remember did basically an exhaustive search of all states in your program, and verified that there were no deadlocks and the properties you specified hold in every state.
Needless to say, this is very memory consuming, and can take a long time. So what you really get to verify is simple models, not your actual application with all its different variables. Also, the tools didn't grok Real World programming language
Re:None of the above... (Score:4, Informative)
Needless to say, this is very memory consuming, and can take a long time. So what you really get to verify is simple models, not your actual application with all its different variables. Also, the tools didn't grok Real World programming languages, so you had to write your model in a language other than the one you would eventually write your application in.
As to the question of whether the tools grok Real World programming languages; the ones I'm thinming of certainly do. Usually they take a Real World programming language and extend it with annotations specifying behaviour, and then verify the actual code against the specification annotations.
That means that you can write Java, annotate your with JML [jmlspecs.org] and have tools like ESC/Java2 [kind.ucd.ie] do verification of the exact Java code you are about to compile against the specifications provided by the annotations. Note that you can get Eclipse plugins to integrate the extended checking right into your Eclipse session.
Alternatively, you can write C# and mark it up according to the extended language Spec# [microsoft.com], and have a theorem prover verifying your C# code against the Spec# verifications (which are just part of the code really) as you go. This is integrated into VisualStudio; you can see an early version of this at work from 2006 here [microsoft.com].
If you're willing to get a little more out there for Real World programming langauges, you also have the otion of using Eiffel with ESpec [yorku.ca] to provide an integrated workbench of theorem proving, automated unit testing, and acceptance testing in one package. There's also the option of going with Ada and using SPARK [praxis-his.com]; in this case you have to use a restricted subset of the full Ada language, but in return SPARK provides real soundness guarantees.
So I guess the answer is: yes, there are real tools that make this sort of approach practical and integrate well with Real World languages.
assembly (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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My suggestion, if you know C++ or Java, is to learn something that isn't slightly object oriented. Pick up Lisp, Haskell, Prolog, any of them. Learn to think in a different direction. Learn straight C. If you really want a challange, hit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm [wikipedia.org] and learn o
None (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not all syntax (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not all syntax (Score:5, Interesting)
Visitor? If you have first-class closures, it's the most natural thing in the world to pass a function to a traversal function. You don't need a name for it or a specialized set of trigger terms so that maintainers can see easily divine your intentions. You don't name your closure "visit", you name it after what it does.
Singleton? Whatever for, if you can create object literals, or your classes are as first-class and polymorphic as instances?
Factory? In Python, you override __new__...
Learning other languages lets you determine the difference between unification and duct tape.
Anything But Perl (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Anything But Perl (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Lots of reasons to start out with Perl (Score:3, Informative)
* 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, kor
Whitespace (Score:5, Funny)
I have yet to find the courage to actually attempt this. . .
Re:Whitespace (Score:5, Funny)
KTHXBYE
Don't Forget Piet (Score:4, Interesting)
"Beyond C++ and Java?!?!?" (Score:2, Interesting)
But my suggestions are:
Python - go learn why strong-typing doesn't mean a lot in practice (except for headaches).
Lisp / Haskell / whatever - go learn ' a different way' of programming things. Trust me, it rocks.
Ruby / ECMAScript - it's the future baby.
Malbologe (Score:2, Interesting)
Get the Little Schemer (Score:5, Interesting)
I recommend the book The Little Schemer [neu.edu] 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.
It depends (Score:3, Insightful)
The right answer to most such questions is, "It depends."
What sort of tools will be useful in your future career? Or, what sort of knowledge will be interesting to learn?
If you are concerned with serious engineering issues, such as safety and correctness, you might want to learn something about "formal methods". Languages to look at include Z and B. And, of course, there's a little field called "computational logic."
If you are concerned with commercial byte-pushing, you obviously need to be conversant in SQL and an assortment of scripting languages. And, of course, there's a little field called "accounting" that might be useful.
I don't think there is any one right answer. The choice of intellectual tools that you will need really depends on the choice of what kinds of work you want to do.
Best Language to Learn Multithreaded Programming? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Best Language to Learn Multithreaded Programmin (Score:3, Informative)
Are there any languages that are more efficient for multithreaded programing?
Well, if you are happy programming in a functional style, Haskell has fairly nice parallel capabilities. (However, the difference between Haskell and C++ or Java is so large that you probably oughtn't learn it if you aren't interested in the language for its own sake.)
The basic idea is this: in Haskell (or most other functional languages), you know that different function calls will not interfere with each other (everything is thread safe out of the box), so they can be evaluated in parallel. Function eval
Haskell, Scheme or Lisp. (Score:3, Insightful)
Please please please learn a functional programming language. Even if you don't use it in your daily work, your brain will be improved.
Screw them all. (Score:5, Interesting)
MATLAB (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't laugh. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Arc (Score:3, Informative)
Arc [arclanguage.com] looks like a promising new programming language that goes back to the roots of what Lisp should be. It's managed to build a reasonable community in a very short amount of time and there's a lot of buzz.
Re:Verilog (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Verilog (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Verilog (Score:5, Insightful)
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Uggh...pointers...BAD BAd bAD......no....not...the pointers again....[trembles]
I can deal with about anything, except pointers. Thanks for bringing the nightmares back again....
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But if you think about it, that doesn't make any sense anyway: the entire point of using a property instead of making the field it aliases public to begin with is that you want to restrict access through the getter and setter. Or in other words, if you could access the address of the field then you could bypass the getter and setter.
I
Re:Verilog (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Parent post is uninformed garbage.
Verilog is a hardware description language used to describe blocks of logic and the interconnections between them. It has only the most superficial similarities to a conventional procedural programming langua
Re:Verilog (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Verilog (Score:5, Insightful)
An FPGA might very well be able to do very little. See Adrian Thompson's page [susx.ac.uk], especially his 1990s work on evolving FPGA circuits.
'An FPGA' could be a very limited device.
Re:Verilog (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Verilog (Score:4, Informative)
*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 [iolanguage.com].
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...
To your list above, I would add....
(By you, I don't mean "you" specifically, but "you" generically.)
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