Fanciful Magic

New Year...New Stuff To Learn

Well, I had time today to sleep and recover from nursing a sick system by spending time away from it. One thing that I like to do every year is set a few goals for myself. These always include learning a few new tricks. In the past, these have included learning Erlang, Lisp, Javascript, Prolog, Ruby, and etc. This year I plan on sinking my teeth into Python, CLIPS, and Scheme. Why so many languages? Well, I don't think Python and Scheme will be far different from things I already know. CLIPS is not too far of a stretch as well, but I really want to get into the way it does things. In the past, what I mainly pull from various languages is a different perspective. I look at programs a lot differently after really getting into Lisp and Erlang. In fact, learning Lisp is what really made me comeback to Smalltalk and realize just how painful and unhappy programming in java made me. I would still love to have a job doing lisp one day just to experience it on a full time basis. Now, yoy might wonder why I would pick Python. Well, I pick Python because a lot of interesting language research seems to be going on with it and I'm liking a lot of the frameworks I'm seeing coming out of the Python community. I picked Scheme because it's supposed to be a cleaner Lisp. It's going to be an exciting year and I hope to learn a whole lot more about craft. I also pray that there's a Camp Smalltalk this year too! If not, maybe I'll go to a Camp Python, Ruby, or Lisp. Now, that would be fun, wouldn't it?!