Mind Stretcher E Study Buddy

[Annette Fazzari]

Earlier this year, I had a conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas (joint authors of The Pragmatic Programmer and original signatories of the Agile Manifesto). They recommended (and have suggested in the past) the practice of learning at least one new programming language a year.

The reasoning behind this practice has very little to do with marketing oneself or even using the language. In reality, the most significant benefit of learning a new programming language is the stretching of the mind and the creation of new neural pathways that allow you to look at problems in new and unique ways.

I've compiled this list of languages primarily because they are languages I'm interested in spending more time learning, but also because they exemplify specific language characteristics and programming ideologies very well.

OOP was created by Dr. Alan Kay, who once said: "Object-oriented programming to me means only messaging, encapsulating and hiding state, and extreme late-binding of all things." Ruby is good at this stuff.

Due to the nature of Ruby's message-sending-obsessiveness, it's an incredible environment to learn true OOP. I recommend Sandi Metz's wonderful Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby as an introduction to Ruby's strengths when it comes to designing objects and message sending.

Being able to manipulate programs via metaprogramming, while sometimes frustrating, can require an extreme paradigm shift in your mental model of the relationship between programmer and programming language.

Another mind-bending feature of Elixir is its relationship with Erlang. Elixir runs on the Erlang VM (BEAM), meaning that at some point most Elixir developers have to develop some comfort with Erlang.

I could easily run off on a tangent here, but the most interesting thing about Erlang (in my opinion) is its mind-boggling prowess when it comes to concurrency. Writing Elixir means learning to think concurrently, a skill that can be applied in a multitude of programming environments.

Finally, Elixir is a beautiful exemplar of a concept called pattern matching. Pattern matching is a very powerful functional language feature that enables you to interact with data in a very concise and safe way. Pattern matching is not exclusive to Elixir, so a solid understanding of pattern matching in your Elixir code will translate to other languages and problems easily.

Rust is a fast, compiled language that brings some new ideas to the table. It is expressly intended to solve a number of the memory safety issues that arise when writing C++, which is frequently used to solve similar systems programming problems.

In Rust, you can learn about writing low-level code that interacts directly with hardware, you can learn about concurrency, you can learn about a couple of different paradigms, and you can learn it all with relative safety.

One other brain enlarging feature in Rust is called macros. Macros are a form of metaprogramming that enables developers to write less code and be a little less specific when it's convenient. Not without caveats, macros are challenging to reason about and therefore can help you to develop a different perspective on the metaprogramming you've seen in languages like Ruby.

For those who are unfamiliar (which would be hard considering its popularity), TypeScript is a language that compiles directly to JavaScript. It adds some additional features to the JavaScript language, but it still feels like JavaScript.

The brain stretching in TypeScript comes from the incremental approach in which it can be adopted and its focus on static typing. If like me, you come from a web background with languages like Python, Ruby, or PHP, static typing is generally a foreign concept. However, TypeScript is a friendly way to introduce yourself to this handy language feature.

Haskell is described as "purely functional" meaning that state is entirely immutable in this programming language. Learning to work with totally immutable state forces you to develop a wholly different approach to working with data.

Many developers who work with Haskell also comment on the clarity of meaning and purpose experienced with reading Haskell. While this is subjective, the language itself tends to produce code that is very explicit and in many cases, obvious. No one gets upset when code is too obvious. Unironically, Haskell code tends to be very concise.

One of the most challenging concepts in Haskell is called a Monad. Monads allow developers to avoid typing excess code and string together multiple computations. The Haskell documentation frequently describes Monads as "a strategy for combining computations to produce more complex computations."

By introducing yourself to new tools and the techniques they enable, you can become a more well-rounded and creative engineer. If you are curious and adventurous enough, you may even find language features and programming paradigms that you can bring back to your preferred language.

First of all, I would like to thank You for writing this article. Secondly, I would also like to state that arguing about languages is beneath me and please don't get offended as I'm only writing about my experience and conveying my own opinion.

I still notice that many people perceive programming comprising Web only technologies like JavaScript, React, Vue, etc. On the other hand, C++ is considered the most complicated all purpose language that is mostly used for high performance and system programming.

First of all, C++ is not so great and you can say what you will, but template hell aside, C is much faster and cleaner language and if low level and embedded is your thing, there's no other language that will make you REALLY understand how memory, threading and CPU works.

If you are in academic circles, doing some extensive calculations, then GPU or OpenCL will be your best friend, and that is also where C is your only option. The only low level language other than C is VHDL, a relatively new language used for FGPA programming.

So called modern programming paradigms apply only for Web and Mobile world since nothing has really changed, apart from new buzzwords that are basically synonyms for algorithms and/or technologies that have been available for quite a while. There are exceptions of course, but in the case of C++, there is really nothing you can do in C++ that you can't do in C. I accept that some will argue against type safety of void pointers and casting issues but the whole point of low level languages is to learn how stuff really works. If you are aware of endianness, padding, byte boundaries and how pointer arithmetic works, you will begin to appreciate the gained knowledge which will outweigh the initial frustrations of C. GDB and Valgrind are exceptional tools and are only getting better (GCC/Clang fsanitize methods).

I welcome the advances in Web realm, but let's not forget that all that JS is compiled and prepared by Node.js, served mostly by some Virtual Machines running on some *NIX distributions, and ALL of that is written in C. Node.js is a combination of C and C++ but it's core part, libuv, is written also in pure C.

I admire people who are mastering JavaScript and Web technologies because, let's be honest, it's chaos out there. JS is constantly being updated and it's really hard to follow, so I applaud you guys and don't take this as me putting C on a pedestal. I'm just to trying to remind everybody that it took a great deal of knowledge to create such a stable and old language, not to mention compilers, optimizations, etc.

Calling VHDL new also sounds strange when it's from 1980. VHDL (1980) and Verilog (1984) are two hardware description languages. Their purpose is completely different from general programming languages and I would not classify them together with those. What could be said is that VHDL borrows syntax from Ada and Verilog borrows from C.

Hi and thanks for the history lession. I don't know much about VHDL, but I only used the word 'new' since it became more popular these days with increasing popularity of FGPA hardware. And I would agree that ASM is the real low level language, but let's put everything in todays context when everything is JS alike; in that case, C should be considered a low level language.

I actually have written some C code and respect it as the defacto standard for applications where a small memory footprint is of the utmost importance. I do not disagree with you on the majority of your points.

I would have included C on this list, but I wanted to include Rust (which can serve some of the same needs as C) as this article is actually based on the five languages I'm most interested in mastering.

Although I'm a C programmer and do mostly backend network programming involving raw sockets, packet capture, etc., I disagree when newcomers get advised to start from C language because they need to know how memory, cpu and whatever works at the basic lebel. That's great, but that's like saying I need to be a mechanic to learn how do drive. Since most of developments today is web dev which is done mainly in higher level languages like Javascript, there really is no need to burden yourself with all the complexities of C, C++ or any other statically compiled language with manual memory management. Unless you want to go in that direction like me for example or are attracted to embedded devices, stick to higher level languages. This is my opinion and in no way a professional guidance of any sort.

Also, learning all about memory, and CPU in the Von Neumann model is not necessarily reflective of modern computing models. Furthermore, it deprives us of the question of how high level programming should be done. Low level is not the most common paradigm for programming these days. Its more effective Software Engineering if we can hide away details of the architecture and the machine and let the language/platform deal with them. A great example of this is SQL, which although it has its problems as a language, is great at hiding away all the parallelism that goes behind it.

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