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What languages have you looked at or learned of late that have to totally jazzed. I have been looking at Erlang and Haskell and both have me totally excited to write code in them.

What features of the language caused you to think about programming in a new way.

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I agree with Haskell. It seems like a really mind altering experience especially since I haven't had significant experience with functional languages. – chiurox Feb 14 '11 at 12:48
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Please check the FAQ and Good Subjective, Bad Subjective blog post to learn what makes a good question. This is a "list of X" question and is therefore not constructive. If you have a specific question to ask please ask that instead. – ChrisF♦ Feb 14 '11 at 12:49
I really like Erlang and Haskell does seem interesting (though I must admit I haven't done that much with learning it) – Jetti Feb 14 '11 at 13:37
I'm kind of late to the game, and while it didn't really make me think of programming much differently, I am quite enjoying Python. :) – Mr. Shickadance Apr 13 '11 at 11:38
I recommend Clojure hands down! – Job Apr 14 '11 at 14:05

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11 Answers

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Why not get a flavour of several types by reading Seven Languages in Seven Weeks?

It covers Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure and Haskell. Each has it's own place to solve particular problems and the book offers a very rapid (and not simplistic) introduction to each.

Out of the above list, I was quite surprised by what Prolog had to offer and Haskell is very cool.

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Actually I have been reading that book, but was interested in what has other folks jazzed – Zachary K Feb 14 '11 at 13:24
Thanks for that link about Haskell! It's all so true.. – Yorick Sijsling Feb 14 '11 at 14:34
@Yorick I just can't bring myself to tell Java, though... – Gary Rowe Feb 14 '11 at 17:06
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+1 I've just started trying Haskell about 2 weeks ago. Very interesting and fun so far. See message below with links – MalsR Apr 13 '11 at 11:38
+1 for Clojure! – Kugathasan Abimaran Dec 9 '11 at 17:48
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C, or how I stopped worrying and started to love the pointer

I am taking a course in (embedded) C. As other people says it is low-level and all that. But it have a niche in embedded environments and it is kind of liberating to be alone with the hardware. no big and fancy libraries. Just you and the compiler.

For me it have been confidence building. A unembellished experience.
Hope it helps
Gorgen

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+1 for selecting C. – luis.espinal Apr 14 '11 at 14:28
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Google's Closure templating language, which compiles into Javascript functions that return HTML strings. It's powerful, elegant, incredibly useful, and not coupled to any Javascript framework.

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Erlang, Haskel, Scala and Ruby - learning them little by little.

Google Go is an interesting one as well.

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F#, particularly via Real World Functional Programming. I haven't got the chance to write much F#, but it has made my C# and powershell skills much sharper.

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I recently dabbed into the world of functional programming by learning (ongoing) Haskell. Good documentation so far and this is my first peak into Functional programming.

http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters

If you don't have time to download/install compiler try the online evaluator http://tryhaskell.org/

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I'm myself dabbling in Haskell (after reading a number of tutorials but never have time to really get into it) and so far I really like it. I'm still waiting for my "Real World Haskell" copy to arrive :) – Matthieu M. Apr 13 '11 at 17:57
@Matthieu excellent ;) – MalsR Apr 17 '11 at 9:58
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I recommend C# with ASP.NET. I know it's one of the more popular less obscure languages and methodology but I think it's a great learning experience.

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up vote 6 down vote

Prolog and Lisp. Declarative languages.

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I picked up Land of Lisp and realized how cool Lisp is! I also have dabbled in Clojure, which is pretty neat as well (nothing wrong with Lisp on the JVM!) – Jetti Feb 14 '11 at 13:36
Yea. Pretty neat! – Kugathasan Abimaran Feb 15 '11 at 4:04
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Groovy: All the Java infrastructure goodness, plus the terseness of a dynamic scripting language.

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up vote 2 down vote

Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Ruby: beautiful scripting language, relatively low entry barrier, great documentation.

Ruby On Rails: easy to learn framework for building web-sites, great documentation, plenty of open-source web-apps to learn from, many open-source IDEs available.

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I must say, once I took Rails out of the Ruby equation, I really started to like Ruby. It is a wonderful language and is truly fun to use. Rails on the other hand, makes me want to crawl in a hole and never come out. I'll stick with ASP.Net MVC thank you very much! :) – Jetti Feb 14 '11 at 13:35
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JQuery.

It's a library, rather than a language, but it has made DOM scripting and ajax calls exciting, fun and easy and is so well documented and intuitive.

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not a language per-se, but jquery totally rocks. – Zachary K Feb 14 '11 at 12:41
+1 for JQuery, a library that feels like a beautifully fluid language (when used right.) – luis.espinal Apr 14 '11 at 14:21

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