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Which new language to learn?

2 points by alixander ↗ HN
I want to pick up a new language. My question is, how do I know which one will turn out to be valuable or here to stay? There's quite a few to choose from -- Julia, D, Go, etc --, so I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations? I mostly do web dev by the way.

6 comments

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zoowar
If you want to do number crunching, julia, otherwise avoid it. There are just too many oddities that, imo, will limit it's acceptance as a general purpose programming language.
dllthomas
What languages do you know? There's value to sampling a number of points in the space, whether or not they're "here to stay" (though of course, languages "here to stay" will have additional perks).
keithwarren
Do you know any c based languages like C itself, C++, objective-C, c#? Any of those would be good to learn.

But you are asking the wrong questions. It is almost never the language that matters, it is the framework.

As a webdev, Rails or NodeJS would be good. Meteor is getting more and more interesting and if you want to stay employed and well paid for the next 20 years knowing asp.net would not hurt.

alixander
Also Haskell is another option I was thinking about. I know C, Java, Javascript and Python. Node and Django are what I use. The language doesn't have to relate to web dev, I'm just interested in seeing how and where I could benefit from using a new language by learning one.
alixander
Perhaps by way of doing the Euler projects in them or something.
dllthomas
Haskell's good. I might recommend an ML first as a smaller step (type system much like Haskell's, mostly similar design patterns, but tackle pervasive laziness later...). YMMV, of course.