What are the new language choices for Experienced programmers?

Question

I know the topic I started is too subjective. But I just wanted some expert guidance learning new languages. I've been working with .NET languages (C#, VB.NET) quite a few years (around 4). And it's been years since I stopped experimenting with new laguages after settling down in a job.

Few weeks back I just started working on my personal project, which I am going to spend much time in the coming months. During the analysis I found that I just can't accomodate the luxuries of cost effective languages, programs and IDEs. So I planned to move to the wide spectrum of open source languages and tools.

And when I look at the current choices, I was just speechless. Hundreds of promising open languages and toolsets and I found it's hard to choose. And I can't even think of evaluating each language myself (it's a worst nightmare). Currently I started with Mono (for the sake of C#).

I felt this is going to be a good chance for learning new programming languages and models. So I am open to any language that offers me the following:

• more functional
• dynamic language features
• better language elegance (like lambdas, Haskel like SQL syntaxes or C# LINQ)
• better community support
• must be open
• easy interaction with the web
• support for parallelism and concurrency (easy threading)
• better in performance
• proven web frameworks
• better IDE support (I got this ease of use syndrome after using years of MS tools)

I love the Haskel and Erlang language programming approach. But I don't have a clue about these languages' web stack and concurrency mechanisms.

EDIT: i would appreciate few reasons along with your choices. It will be really helpful.

Cheers

Ramesh Vel

Answer 1

In the .NET world sounds like you're talking either F# and IronRuby. IronPython might also suit your needs.

Answer 2

I think that all these meet your requirements:

• Groovy + Grails or
• Python + one of these Web Frameworks or
• Ruby + Rails/Camping/Merb/Sinatra or
• Scala + Lift

My bet is that you'll get the groovier IDE experience with Groovy (and it's Groovy Eclipse Plugin).

Answer 3

Learn OOP, DesignPatterns, understanding of Algorithms... the rest is "just" language. You will find, if You learn 5th... 8th language there are some similarities, some prons and cons... what You need learn is to move business needs to some technical platform.

Answer 4

Weird. I can't believe noone has suggested Python yet.

Answer 5

Personally I'm going to give a vote for Python, Ruby and Mono.NET.

Of the three you were probably on the right track when you said you looked at Mono; it's C# (which you have previous experience with), there are good, free IDEs available SharpDevelop being one which makes it cheap and there's a really solid community behind it all.

Answer 6

F#

Answer 7

These are not new languages, but I vote that if you have experioence with them, then you will be a better programmer in whatever language you choose to use:

• Smalltalk (or Objective-C), otherwise you have not experienced OOP.
• Lisp for functional, reflective, meta programming.
• Prolog for logic programming.

All of these are quite far from your basic C-like language, both in concept and syntax.

Alan Kay invented OOP and Smalltalk, he is quoted as "C++ is not what I intended", and C++ is what most of todays OOP-languages mimics. C++-style OOP is merely syntactic sugar ontop of structs with function pointers. OOP can be so much more. Ruby is closely related, but you would miss out on interleaved method names.

Lisp has been around since 1958, and the fans keep saying that everything that gets added to any new language is just something borrowed from Lisp. Maybe not strictly true, but somewhat accurate, Lisp had garbage collection 50 years ago. Easiest way to experience it today would be to write something in Clojure.

Prolog is based on formal logic. Prolog is declarative, where you declare facts and rules and is executed by constructing queries on these relations. Kind of like puzzle games in some magazines :).

Answer 8

You don't really say what kind of programming you want to do. Do you already know C/C++? If not, I'd really recommend learning those instead of anything new and fancy.

However, if it's new and fancy that you want and you'd like to be able to write native apps, then I'd have a look at:

D

It's similar to C++, but hopefully better in many ways. It has the advantage of out performing most other new and fancy languages and most of the features on your wish list.