From: Dan Sugalski <dan@...>
Date: 2002-08-22T03:24:11+09:00
Subject: Re: What New Language After Ruby?

At 11:52 PM +0900 8/21/02, 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?

Folks have already thrown Lisp, OCaml, Prolog, and Japanese into the 
mix, and Smalltalk is always floating around. Given that those are 
reasonably academic languages (Okay, except for Japanese :) I'll add 
a few of the more low-level or odd languages.

Forth: Backwards Think You Will! But it's also a good way to get your 
brain around Postscript. And it's a very different way of thinking 
about things.

Assembly Language: Doesn't matter whose, though a good old-fashioned 
CISC assembly, like, for example, VAX or Motorola 68000, is the most 
satisfying. Oddly powerful and hobbled assemblies like IBM's OS/390 
are good too.

Fortran: Yeah, it's older than you are, but it still can't be beat for speed.

APL: Matrix math, baby, yeah! While it's nearly as unreadable as, 
say, Befunge, it can't be beat for compact math power.

COBOL: None of this wacky (and really twisted) object-oriented COBOL, 
but the original. While COBOL is the whipping-boy of the computer 
industry, I'd much *much* rather find out that the code running my 
bank or calculating my paycheck was written in COBOL than in Java or 
(god forbid) C.

INTERCAL: Because it's always a good idea to know a programming 
language that you can vow to never, ever, program in. Ever.
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk