Folks have already thrown Lisp, OCaml, Prolog, and Japanese into the
mix, and Smalltalk is always floating around. Given that those are
reasonably academic languages (Okay, except for Japanese
I’ll add
a few of the more low-level or odd languages.
Forth: Backwards Think You Will! But it’s also a good way to get your
brain around Postscript. And it’s a very different way of thinking
about things.
Assembly Language: Doesn’t matter whose, though a good old-fashioned
CISC assembly, like, for example, VAX or Motorola 68000, is the most
satisfying. Oddly powerful and hobbled assemblies like IBM’s OS/390
are good too.
Fortran: Yeah, it’s older than you are, but it still can’t be beat for speed.
APL: Matrix math, baby, yeah! While it’s nearly as unreadable as,
say, Befunge, it can’t be beat for compact math power.
COBOL: None of this wacky (and really twisted) object-oriented COBOL,
but the original. While COBOL is the whipping-boy of the computer
industry, I’d much much rather find out that the code running my
bank or calculating my paycheck was written in COBOL than in Java or
(god forbid) C.
INTERCAL: Because it’s always a good idea to know a programming
language that you can vow to never, ever, program in. Ever.
···
At 11:52 PM +0900 8/21/02, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:
To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:
I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?
–
Dan
--------------------------------------“it’s like this”-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk