Learning new languages?

I love to learn new programming languages, specially whose that has new features that could be used to change your personal programming way. Also, it is very useful to get used to accept new ideas and avoid get in in the famous language wars. In this post, I’m going to give my personal idea of these languages, starting from a C/C++ and Java programmer. Over all, this is my personal opinion, after hours of working in these languages, not only using a joy program.

Perl

It was my first scripting language, and I’ve been working in Perl in a proyect for a private company for two years eight hours per day (my first job without extra hours without been paid). In that case, it was a good language decision, and I learnt many tricks to write readable programs in Perl.

• community: A community that likes to create an ecosystem to reuse, that create the CPAN. At the same time, a community that enforces freedom, allowing each one to use the library and guidelines that considers good.

• The good: The CPAN, and the conciseness and flexbility of the language, with packages like Moose and several test packages (and very strange packages in ACME domain :-) ). At the same time, there is always simpler version of packages if you want them.

• The bad: The original Object-Oriented, the complexity in creating your own modules (in comparisons to the simpler packages model like python). Also, if you don’t want to use object-oriented, sometimes you need to create complex combinations of hashes and arrays with references, and it is not very readable.

• Developer tools: I usually edit with Vim, I don’t need any particular framework, but I strongly recommend strict mode, and essential packages like autodie, Moose, <:IO>, test packages like Test::More. Always check CPAN before a new proyect.

I resume, although many people say that Perl is dead, it is still alive, and if you learn it, you don’t regret it, it is a very useful tool. I still makes many small programs almost everyday using Perl because it’s a very useful language, mainly for text processing (probably the best one).

To learn more I recommend the free book Higher-Order Perl, it is a opening book. Also, the freely book Modern Perl is a useful book to see new modern programming ways and wonderful packages.

Python

My first love, a very simple but more readable, and very useful tools for any field. The most beautiful syntax in my opinion. I have been deeply working in Python, for prototyping and several complex project. Also, very good in web developer (my favourite is Django but there are many good ones).

• The good: Its syntax, packages and object models. Also, its libraries have tendency to have simple APIs (by a community very worried about that). The great interactive shell ipython. Also, it have many interesting tools for scientific researchers: numpy, matplotlib, several parallel libraries, scipy.

• The bad: nothing really serious, the inherent problems with duck typing, like excessive trivial testing. However, tools like pyflakes or pylint allow developers reduce trivial errors.

• Developer tools: Sometimes I edit with Vim, but nowadays I uses spyder 2 by its integration with pyflakes and ipython. There are also very good IDEs like eric4. For performance aspects, there are many tools, in a future post, I am going to put a real example of improvement.

I resume, it is a very good language that any developer should now, because it is very simple and useful. Specially for scientific works, not only by the mathematical tool Sage but also by many libraries.

Scala

The most recent adquisition to this list is the Scala language. This JVM language is similar to Groovy but in my opinion, superior. However, it is a very good language but I think that it is not very popular in pragmatic programmer by the scientific origin of its author, clearly seen in its documentation. Also, sometimes the converse developers likes to show how flexible and powerful is the language with complex examples (not in length, but in its syntax) have given the idea of a complex language.

• The good: Its syntax is very orthogonal and simple (reducing the verbosity of Java). It is a strong typing system (different with groovy) with a auto-detection of types (like auto keywords in other languages). It enforces to uses immutable classes and method, allowing you a functional programming.

• The bad: Differences in generical contenedors with Java. There are very powerful but you have to converse from one to another.

• Developer tools: like in Java, I recommed Eclipse with scala plugins. For compiling proyects in both languages you can use maven but you need several plugins (only if you combine them). Another compiling tools like sbt or grandle could be useful.

In resume, a very interesting language that java developer should give a look, but it still have a promising future.

In my opinion, its community should ‘break’ the idea of complexity or it going to be a very niching language while groovy would be stronger and widely used.

In resume

I always recommend to learn new languages. You can learn many possibilites: clojure, immutability, libraries, … that are not so visible in your current main language.

PS: I have let out other languages that I’ve been playing in: R, Ruby, Haskell, groovy, F# because I want to write only about languages in which I have a strong knowledge, and used it in real-word projects (and not only joy projects).