Programming Commitment Update
We are approaching the last quarter of the year and some may be wondering or perhaps forgotten about my programming commitment goal. Back in February I blogged about wanting to spend some time this year trying out some different programming languages hoping to explore their strengths and how I might use what I learn from them to do interesting things in my chosen programming languages. For anyone coming into this topic new, I am not a professional programmer, but a hobbyist. While I have not abandoned this goal, there is a reason why I have not gotten very far nor posted any updates until now.
The language I tackled first was Ruby, and while I actually thought Ruby might possibly replace my interest in Python, I quickly discovered why that would not happen now and will likely not ever happen. I have tinkered with Python from a very high level for a number of years for my non-web related programming. As mentioned before, I am pretty happy with PHP for my web programming needs. Python is a language I have started to use for little command line tools and toys and if I were going to explore Ruby deeply it was going to have to scratch that same itch. The problem I ran into is that when trying to learn how to program specific things with Ruby, a large percentage of the content on the web is for Ruby on Rails. I have no interest in in developing anything on the web with Ruby, so that framework was pointless to me. I did explore Ruby for roughly a month, and played around with it, but in the end it just made me want to dive deeper into Python.
So I ended up enrolling in a Python class through the O'Reilly School of Technology. While the class was not out of this world, it did get me thinking more like a Python programmer than I did prior to the course. Before and after the course I have been tinkering with a Python project used for file sharing with a friend (Scott Wood) and continued toying around with some of my own projects. Within the next month we will probably be doing more with our file sharing project, named Gremlin, and perhaps working on some other Python related projects.
Since I have not abandoned my goal of trying out some other programming languages, I have the last quarter of the year to hopefully check out at least two more languages that I have not experimented with before. The two languages I am considering are Haskell and Erlang, neither of which I have ever experimented with. I chose these two because I stumbled across both when initially thinking of trying this experiment. I have not started to seriously look at either language and I am not married to the idea of exploring these two specifically. If by chance anyone reading this has some other language suggestions I would love to hear your thoughts as to why I should explore another language.
