4 Languages you should learn in 2009

by BigCanOfTuna • 18 years ago

34 38 18 years ago

The Pragmatic Programmer Books suggests you learn a new language every year. I suggest you learn 4 that will be beneficial to your career in 2009.

schtog• 18 years ago

"It is one of two official languages used at Google and it does power a lot of their most profitable products."

One of 2? I thought 4: Java, Python, C++, Javascript.

And does it really power a lot of their most profitable products? Like which?

(Not bashing here, Python is my main language and I love it.)

jimbokun2• 18 years ago

My understanding is that Python is their go-to scripting language, for tying together all their low level tools that run in C++ and Java.

bdotdub• 18 years ago

Haha I thought Google has only one profitable product, AdSense :)

That said, a number of their high profile apps are in Python, most notably YouTube and App Engine.

whacked_new3• 18 years ago

To be blunt and disrespectful, after seeing the author confusing Cantonese and Mandarin, I am quite skeptical of the assertions.

BigCanOfTuna2• 18 years ago

Oh, give me a break! I did approve the comment by the user who pointed out the mistake, kindly thanked him, AND struck the comment rather than try to hide it like so many other revisionist bloggers out there.

cstejerean• 18 years ago

I recommend checking out Clojure instead of Erlang.

jimbokun2• 18 years ago

Clojure comes close to answering almost all of my complaints with other languages.

- The mature libraries and deployment environment of the JVM. So your code runs fast, runs almost anywhere, and a lot of work is already done for you.

- Data literals for arrays and maps. One of the shortcomings of Common Lisp. And catches up with (surpasses?) Python/Ruby/Javascript in this regard.

- ISeq interface means that a single set of functions works across all collection types. (Common Lisp has an amazing array of functions for working on lists, but hit and miss for other collection types.)

- Lisp 1. I know this is an aesthetic thing, but I much prefer how the code looks than Lisp 2's.

- Steals a lot of arc's good ideas, like abbreviated syntax for function literals and semantics for arrays/maps in function position.

- Common Lisp style macros. Just more intuitive, for me, than the hygienic type.

- Interesting place in the space of computer programming languages. Dynamic typing, with an emphasis on programming to interfaces, macros, first class functions, immutable data structures, and built in mechanisms to support parallel programming. I don't know of any other language that chooses this set of tradeoffs.

crabapple2• 18 years ago

i would recommend clojure if you want to learn "a lisp"...along the positives you cite, it has a growing community, very active development, hype (in a good way), and deployability.

gaius3• 18 years ago

Erlang is a great language, but I've never managed to do any useful work with it. Very few people are actually working on things that are othogonal to telecom switches. Single-paradigm languages will always be stuck in niches (this isn't necessarily a bad thing).

vesan• 18 years ago

I recommend checking out Ruby instead of Python.

razzmataz• 18 years ago

Out of curiosity, could you elucidate why?

pavelludiq2• 18 years ago

Chicks love rubies, but don't like snakes that much. :D

Seriously, you should probably learn both.

qwph2• 18 years ago

Python and Ruby are pretty equivalent in terms of what you can do with them. Given a choice between the two, I'd probably choose Ruby, as I personally find it to be less cognitively dissonant than Python.

I'm really not fond of having to haul the self parameter around all over the place in Python, and there seems to be some confusion between what's a function and what's a method. (Some of this is being addressed in Python 3 I think.)

The whitespace thing, I can just about cope with, but I always miss the colons off the end of lines. Oh, and at least on Windows, the supplied documentation is organized in a seemingly arbitrary manner (but at least it has an index if you know what you're looking for).

Having said that, Python probably has a better standard library than Ruby, so, meh, learn both and see which you prefer.

charlesju• 18 years ago

Ruby on Rails has much more support and evangelism than Django and Python. Learning Ruby, in that sense, has a much more direct impact on your opportunities.

chris112• 18 years ago

I'm surprised they didn't mention arabic with mandarin and russian at the end.

tapostrophemo• 18 years ago

I just took an informal survey amongst my teammates (including Arabic in the list), and "three out of four" developers said: Mandarin.

The interesting thing is that on my team, two are from Russia, one from China, one from Lebanon, one from the UK, and one from India. The other two are Americans.

wallflower• 18 years ago

Classic essay: "Why Chinese is so Damn Hard" http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

"Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility."

gaius3• 18 years ago

What significant technical work is being done in Arabic? (Note, I didn't say "in Arab countries"; the point is that they're using English).

chris112• 18 years ago

I doubt much technical work is being done in arabic. It seems like most work is done in English. I think Arabic is a good language to learn just because of the number of speakers. And of course it will make business easier in middle eastern countries.

vegai• 18 years ago

Haskell instead of anything else. And then some Factor.

Mandarin is a nice touch. I'll try that. Indians, however, speak English pretty well -- even if their accent might take some getting used to.

crabapple2• 18 years ago

haskell is the only programming language that made me reconsider most of my assumptions. its not a tacked-on, hacked-on functional layer on something else, its mind-bending at a fundamental level. because haskell makes no comprimises, it also is showing some insane performance on multicore. its no mistake that the google mapreduce tutorials use haskell in some explanatory examples...

ten years from now, you will be dealing with a multicore world, and you will be using something that is conceptually tied to haskell. i see this as inevitable.

factor i have looked at again and again, worked through some trivial problems...not sure i will ever "get" it. i would brute-force understanding it were it to take off.

callmeed• 18 years ago

Reminds me to break out my russian books ... I'm getting rusty

jwilliams• 18 years ago

Not sure I get the logic behind the line: With the economic slow down, countries with emerging technology sectors and talented, well educated developers will be getting a second look as a means of cutting applicationd(sic) development costs.

Surely with the economic slowdown developers in "un-emerging" economies will be more competitive?

sherl0ck• 18 years ago

I think in 2009, I just wanna dig deeper about python.

truebosko• 18 years ago

Same. I only got into Python this year, but I definitely want to say I'm an expert by next year. Of course, won't ever stop learning new tricks even as an expert :)

4 Languages you should learn in 2009

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