Unfamiliar Languages To Learn

Here are a few languages that I’ve messed around a little with recently. They are all outside the C-derived paradigm, so I don’t really want to focus on them right now. But at some point in the future I’d like to give each of them enough of a shot that I have a reasonable idea of their usefulness and strengths

• Fortran
• Prolog
• Haskell

Concurrency Languages / Frameworks

Here are languages I’m interested in as far as supporting significant concurrency.

• Node.js (JavaScript server framework)
• Go
• Erlang

I’ve been experimenting with Node and am fairly pleased with it so far. At some point I also want to spend more time with Erlang.

I’ve had a fair amount of fondness for JavaScript and Erlang for a number of years, so I think I’d be happy to be using either of them.

I can imagine writing prototypes of web-facing stuff in Node and then where necessary implementing backend stuff in Erlang. There might be other architectures that make sense in combining the two languages.

Go is a languages I haven’t really used yet, but am trying to keep aware of. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. I like the idea of it, and the ideas expressed in it, but I’m a little wary of focusing on it yet. Go doesn’t have a good story on Windows yet, which isn’t really necessary, but I like languages that are fairly cross-platform. Also, it’s interoperability with other languages is still low. That is, it can call C libraries, but there isn’t really a good way for other languages to call Go code. As a result, for the moment at least I might be more likely to write low level stuff in C with the hope that it could be used in whatever other languages I work with.