One New Language a Year: (was) Smalltalk

Man it's weird how we (nerds? professionals? anyone really...) can put this guilt on ourselves. I am in the middle of trying to learn objective-c (iPhone) and all this Clojure stuff has my head spinning. But..what about your half done iPhone app? ahhhh.

Balance has to be the name of the game I guess. The worst part is heading back into work for vbscript after wrestling over "interesting" things in my free time. :)

I sympathize with the guy. There are so many need-to-know languages and frameworks just to keep up with making a living that I have a hard time justifying learning a 30-year-old language that has had the goodness sucked out of it by other languages. Unless it is spectacularly interesting, I adopt just-in-time learning, which works pretty well on your 30th language.

There is no need to learn every "must learn" language out there that gets hyped. Pick up theories of programming language semantics and a clean, easy to parse syntax and experiment with every evaluation model your little heart desires.

The problem then becomes a matter of learning various types of "lambda calculi", or similar formalism, usually in 10 minutes, and you don't have to waste a life-time learning the indentation and semi-colon termination rules of yet another procedural language thrown out at you from the blogosphere.

sigh