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.

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.

What programming language are you guys currently learning? What are your reasons for doing so?

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.

[_5csa]

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.

[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.

[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.