Time again to learn a new language. I enjoy picking up a new language every now and again. It’s a great way to branch out your skill set and usually leads to new programming techniques in languages that are a part of professional or hobby life.
But why bother’ The popular languages have a lot of common elements : functions, types, etc … With all of the common elements what can learning a new language really give you?
It’s true that there are a lot of common elements (especially for .Net based languages). But what really interests me are the features which make the individual language extremely productive. Most languages have a feature or two that really makes it worth learning. They greatly increase the productivity of the developer. Often full libraries are designed around these features. For instance
- C++ and?? Templates
- This is somewhat special in that it’s extraordinarily powerful for both good and evil
- VB and late binding
- C# and iterators
What’s great about learning these features is I can often import them into my current heavily used languages. For instance, even though C#/VB don’t directly support functional style programming, I’ve spent a bit of time over the last few months building libraries that make it fairly easy to incorporate them into either language. This added a deal of flexibility into my programs and a real functional feel.
Lately I’ve been focusing on immutable/persistant data structures, lambda expressions and tuples. This makes F# a natural choice for a language to learn. While I tend to program in a somewhat functional style this will be the first functional language I’ve heavily invested my time in. For awhile I did a bit of Haskell but nothing serious.
I intend to blog about the joys and not so joyful moments of this process.