confidence languages

here are the languages that if i had to build an application myself, and needed high confidence that i could complete that application successfully, these are the languages i would choose from.

• perl
• tcl
• shell (sh / sed / awk)
• php
• javascript
• c++
• go

2nd tier languages (working knowledge)

here are the languages that i could work on an application written in. i’m sure i could write an application in one of these if i had to, but i wouldn’t plan to choose them for an application that depended entirely on my skill to complete.

• ruby
• python
• java
• c#
• c

interest languages

here are languages that i’ve played with, and i understand the concepts of, and may research for insight or interest, but i wouldn’t trust myself to build something complete or successful with.

• scheme
• common lisp
• haskell
• erlang
• forth (i have written a couple of minimal or proto-forth interpreters in awk and javascript)
• lua

future research languages

these are languages that i have interest in researching at some point, but have no practical experience with at the moment.

• clojure
• f#
• sml

avoidance languages

there are languages that for whatever reason i have decided i don’t want to invest time and effort in learning at the current time.

this is not to say these languages aren’t valuable, just that for me to invest in them would represent a major change in direction for me, or more investment than i feel like i would gain back from the language at this point in my life.

• ocaml
• scala
• factor
• pascal
• cobol
• fortran
• smalltalk

browser caching results

using the go directory server code, i have been unable to prevent browsers from caching old information. i’ve been trying to see if i could use html meta tags in the html pages to prevent caching.

so far, i have been unable to prevent caching across browsers, using any combination of html meta tags that i tried. i think i managed to get chrome to avoid caching, but nothing i tried seemed to work on firefox.

i think i’ll need to investigate sending http headers, however, that is going to require knowing more about the go http framework. that’s going to probably require me to abandon the easy to use go directory server example and end up writing my own server implementation.

seven work languages and seven fun languages

so based on my listing above, i think i want to try to learn or at least study something each day about one of the languages that i would choose if i needed high confidence.

• perl
• tcl
• php
• javascript
• shell (sh / sed / awk)
• c++
• go

in addition, i think i would like to maybe pick one language a week to read a book on, probably from the following list (mostly of "interest languages").

• c
• scheme
• common lisp
• haskell
• erlang
• forth
• sml

website serving update

until i can figure out a way to enable proper caching behavior, i’ve gone back to using tcl code from earlier to serve the website. so far it doesn’t seem to cause the problematic behavior.

on the plus side, it is basically written in raw tcl, and is (with modifications i made) only 57 lines. so reading through it again (as i wish to) should be a fairly useful and enlightening experience.

shell : change dos line endings to unix

tr -d '\r'  unix-file.txt