Curly Brace Languages

A couple of days ago I said that I was only concentrating on C derived languages this year. I’m thinking about restating that as "Curly Brace" languages.

If that’s the criteria, the probably the following languages fit:

• C
• C++
• Java
• C#
• Awk
• Perl
• PHP
• JavaScript
• Go

This seems like a fairly decent set of languages to have a grasp on. There’s a range of programming idioms possible in these, and most concepts in Computer Science show up in at least one of these languages.

Go and Perl are the most fringe as far as how closely their syntax tracks with the other languages on the list. Perl has some unexpected gotchas that have bitten me in the past, and Go seems a little mind-bending in terms of it’s coroutine support.

Languages For Next Year

At some point this year will end (Dec, 31, 2012 to be exact) and I will have finished my year of curly braces.

At that point I’m not sure what to concentrate on for the next year.

Here are a few possibilities that seem interesting:

• Erlang – I have a deep fondness for this language, but have not really given it enough attention. It would be cool to go through Learn You Some Erlang.
• Scheme and Forth – Both of these languages exemplify structures that show up in compiler substrates. I wouldn’t mind knowing how to implement either of them in detail.
• Begin/End blocks languages (Algo derived?). I could find a number of languages in this catagory.
  • Ruby
  • Pascal
  • Lua

PouchDB

here – Interesting, a portable reimplementation of the CouchDB api, written as a layer over IndexedDB.

Stuff To Look At Someday

• WebMachine – Erlange webserver