

Ask HN: What language are you learning and why? - chuhnk

I've spent the last year and a half learning ruby. I've used it for scripting tasks, building apps with sinatra, rails and eventmachine. There were a few reasons for my choice. We have a RoR team at work so I would have colleagues to go to for help, there is a great community surrounding ruby and its dynamic scripting language with OO.<p>I'm now looking for another language to branch out into, the likely candidates being java or scala. The reason for that is, I would like to learn a solid language on the jvm that is statically typed, has a good concurrency model and can be used for doing heavy backend processing.<p>What programming language are you guys currently learning? What are your reasons for doing so?<p>I'm hoping this thread helps give a bit of insight into why people pick languages. Whether its popularity, solving a certain problem, or just out of curiosity.
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madhouse
I'm learning Haskell, because I've heard good things about it, and it sounds
like fun.

I already know most of the better known languages, at least on a read level,
so I figured I'll learn something else, for fun.

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clyfe
Scala: for the actors thingie, dsl abilities and general power. Fits great in
my mind for stable (ha) and fast backend server stuff. Afterwards i'll check
clojure. Background: I already know Java, and am a Ruby convert.

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RiderOfGiraffes
fexl, because it looks and sounds cool, should be easy and fast to implement,
is easily embeddable, and makes it easy to create hard/soft layer
abstractions.

