Programming Commitment
This year I am committing myself to some of my previous projects as well as some new ones, both silly and serious. I have a goal of learning a handful of new programming languages over the course of the year in the hope that this will help me find creative solutions in my chosen programming languages. Over the last year I explored Google Go and to fulfill a University requirement I learned Visual Basic. Over the past month I have been revisiting and improving my own PHP code as well as exploring the PHP code powering SemanticScuttle, making minor tweaks to the registration logic to better combat bot spam registering and also making some enhancements to the API to meet our needs. The changes I have made are featured in the installation at Taglr, if you would like to help test the project please sign-up for an account. So while I have at least glanced at a few other programming languages over the years and I have been actively doing some programming, this is more about making a concerted effort at being a better programmer.
PHP has always been my preferred choice for web programming, and I have explored a whole host of other languages over the years using them to scratch whatever itch I needed at the time. I am hoping by pursuing this goal that I might find some other languages to use as tools for other scenarios I encounter in my profession and my hobbies. My hope is not to necessarily become proficient with these new programming languages but to explore their strengths and how I might use what I learn from them to do interesting things in my chosen programming language.
The first language I am going to tackle is Ruby. I played around with Ruby on Rails a few years ago, and even wrote a rough blogging tool, but that is where my exploration ended. What interests me most about Ruby is that it is a pure object-oriented language. What little I know about Ruby is that just about everything is an object. I have read that Ruby is syntactically similar to Python and Perl, both of which I have written small programs, but nothing of real substance. Python in the last year or so has been my language of choice if I felt I needed something more than a shell script. I cannot say whether Ruby will replace Python, but I hope learning Ruby will at least enhance my Python programming abilities.
I intend to spend a month or more with each programming language I choose, as someone who enjoys learning new things this activity will mostly be a journey of learning. If along this journey I find a niche for an acquired skill I might devote more time on a particular programming language or project. As a result I do not want to put a number, an order or necessarily choose the other languages at this point, although I do have quite a few ideas.
