Programmers: I'm in the mood to learn a new language. Which one should it be?

Perl. Hubby says it makes business application easier to program.

I love Ruby.. My favorite too.

What about Objective C? Write a iPhone app. I like XCode. The IDE is nice.

indeed objective c is very nice and xcode a very decent ide (for apple).

if you find you like objective c, then you must try smalltalk. true, it won’t translate directly to your career, but for someone that loves programming and elegant languages, smalltalk is my all time favorite programming language for tinkering. get a free small talk environment from cincom.

also, scheme is cool. visit this website for a (classic) book on the topic of programming that uses scheme (a dialect of LISP) as the language for exposition – scheme. here again, for the sheer joy of programming.

@johnpowell
have you tried ruby cocoa? If so, what did you think?

@avalmez
same questions, only for clojure

@avalmez no i haven’t although my curiosity regarding ruby is high. actually wasn’t aware of ruby cocoa…certainly something i’ll check out. thanks for the prod!

@avalmez I meant, do you have any opinion about clojure?

@phoenyx i thought you misspelled “closure” and so obviously not :) so, thanks for a second prod

I am a big, big fan of Ruby on OS X. I think I want to spend the rest of my life developing Cocoa apps in HotCocoa, which simplifies MacRuby by making the method calls most Ruby-like.

Well, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention python, since all th cool kids are (still) using it—and my feeling is that it’s going to replace Perl as the de fecto glue language.

Obj C would be great, too—and I’ve heard absolutely amazing things about smalltalk.

Why not just learn Pascal and write code for a 68000x Mac?

Vala is interesting, but not really different. You could try looking into a non-imperative language, perhaps a declarative language (I learned Prolog – it was different indeed, but I hated it because it’s so ugly and only half-declarative).

Or you could try NetLogo – I have to do some things with that atm at school and it’s really terrible… But different ;-)

@andrew
I’ve thought about learning Python several times. Ruby is also ”going to replace Perl.” I wonder if it will actually be a Ruby/Python hybrid (okay, seriously).

@Vincentt
I think you just talked me out of Prolog and NetLogo :)

@phoenyx If you’re really looking to jump onto the cool kids bandwagon, check out Scala. That’s the hottest thing these days.

But I couldn’t be happier with Python.

INTERCAL.

If you just want to have some fun, try Processing .

have a look at some of the cool stuff you can do on YouTube

Well, it turns out that my next language is going to be clojure. There is a project at work (that I’m taking over) that was written in a proprietary dialect of lisp that needs to be ported to something open and needs to interact with a bunch of java stuff. Clojure seems to be uniquely suited.