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I don't understand your misgivings about lisp. Particularly since you are citing PragProg as your inspiration for this question. One good reason to learn a la
by frobozz 16y ago
I don't understand your misgivings about lisp. Particularly since you are citing PragProg as your inspiration for this question.
One good reason to learn a language is because it is radically different to the languages you currently know. Exposure to different paradigms will make you a better programmer.
Regarding learning Java, it's not a bad idea. Another good reason to learn a language is because it is used in a specific project you want to contribute to, or because you think that a novel project would best be achieved using it.
If you know one squiggly bracket imperative language, there's little point in learning another one prior-to-need. Anything you can pick up going through dry tutorials, you should be able to pick up on-the-job quickly enough. To achieve mastery, you need to really be using it, so learning it one year for its own sake, without a reasonably complex project, won't get you there.
- alcuadrado 16y agoLisp attracts me just because it seems different to me, and my only experience with functional programming is with Haskell, so trying a loosly typed FP language seems cool. Particularly, I have seen Scheme used in the PL community and some books about that; and Clojure seems to have been gaining popularity lastly, mostly because of it's concurrences features. I know learning another language of a paradigm I already know is more or less usless, and although you can put Java and Smalltalk in that category, Java has an enormous community, full of different projects, libraries, frameworks, and more, which IMO would teach me a lot. And smalltalk, just for fun :) About using a language to achieve mastery, I totally agree.
- frobozz 16y agoI've just reread your original post, and now I understand what you mean by "doubting". When I first read it, I thought you were discounting it because it was so different, now I see that it is one of your options.
- alcuadrado 16y agoSure it is, after reading a little about it in the book The computational beauty of nature ( http://bit.ly/fEJ8Cn http://bit.ly/fEJ8Cn ), I've been quite attracted by it, and Scheme and Clojure are the dialects which seem more promissing to me.