I have a New Year’s resolution for the year 2015. My goal is to learn the basics of a new programming language each month of the year. The goal is to familiarize myself with different languages and paradigms and perhaps get some new perspective on the languages I used daily. I’ve attempted to select languages that are somewhat useful instead of delving into the too archaic or too experimental.
Image by hobvias sudoneighm
Here’s the plan:
- January - Go
- February - Python
- March - Dart
- April - OCaml
- May - Ruby
- June - Haskell
- July - Rust
- August - C#
- September - Erlang
- October - Lisp
- November- Clojure
- December - Lua
There are also some wildcard languages that I might choose to go for instead of the list above like Julia, Swift. Time will tell what will happen.
I’ve set myself some basic goals to reach with each language. I’ll build a web scraper and a simple web server with each language. This will teach the syntax, available language constructs, methods for handling concurrency, and the toolchain necessary to work with each of the languages. I will also take a look at the ecosystems around the languages as an active and thriving community makes a huge difference when developing software.
You can follow my progress on GitHub https://github.com/sampov2/one-language-per-month-2015
EDIT (Jan 11th 2015): As the Rust language is progressing nicely, I decided to dump Objective C in favor of it as the language of July.
EDIT 2 (Feb 16th 2015): Nim is another interesting emerging language. If I bump into a language I don’t really want to deal with (I’m looking at you C#), I just might switch to Nim instead.