From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@...>
Date: 2002-08-22T02:12:51+09:00
Subject: Re: What New Language After Ruby?

William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:
> To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:
> 
> I think in the book "The Pragmatic Programmer", one of the advices is to
> learn a new language at least once a year.  Probably for the year 2001 it
> was Ruby.  Now we are already in August 2002.  Is there any language
> candidate for this year?
> 
> I am sorry, it is not my intention to have a discussion on defending
> Ruby.  The intention is to gather information on what other good new
> languages out there are worthy to learn, after we know Ruby (hopefully the
> language can be considered to be "better" than Ruby in some specific
> areas, or just simply has totally different approach; hopefully also we
> will not have to consider Lisp-like programming languages).
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Bill

I have learnt OCAML some month ago and it seems to be a really nice language,
a very good complement to C/C++ and Ruby. It is fast (compilable to native
code,which is slower than optimized but faster than nonoptmized C code),
automatically garbage collected and it suits very well for logically
nontrivial problems. It supports object oriented programming, but
I did not find this feature really compelling. Using it for functional
style programms is a lot of fun.

I can recommend it to everybody.

Regards, Christian