Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Whats next after java?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what language I should learn next. I certainly wouldn’t call myself an “advanced” java developer, but I feel like I’m at the intermediate stage and its time to learn a mroe dynamic language. So I’ve been reading up about Ruby, Python, and Lisp at places like c2 and Paul Graham’s homepage. In college I had some classed in Eiffel, C++, and Pascal, but nothing like a scripting language. My idea is not to learn something I would necessarily find a job for, but to learn something to help me aquire new ways to think as a programmer. Having a tool for rapid prototyping would be nice, also, of course.

At this point, I think I’ve eliminated Lisp. It just seems a huge jump from Java and with my limited time to spend on this, I think I’d get discouraged and lose interest. Ruby on Rails might be a nice starter project to try and get up and running, and it also has the whole Pragmatic Programmer thing going for it. Python seems to have an active Java subset going with Jython, which is a plus for that. I could easily see integrating scripting into my java work at some point with that. I believe JRuby, the Ruby implementation for Ruby, has been pretty much abandoned.

Ah well - there is always too much I want to learn and never enough time. I think Jython might be the best way to get started, and see where it goes from there.

I’d actually suggest staying away from Jython. It is a *great* tool, but if you are learning a new language you usually do better immersing yourself in it so you learn the nuances. Working in Jython tends to become writing Java with Python syntax unless you already know Python.

Python, btw, is a great language. I prefer Ruby, personally, but both rock.

Why not learn a little more about computer science instead of the latest lame knock-off language. Try enhancing you knowledge by studying algorithms, learning new theories, analyzing data structures, or actually applying patterns to your code.

Brian: Thanks for the suggestion - I’ve actually started reading up on Ruby and plan on coding in it when I get some free time.

Anon: Its a bit silly to call Ruby and Python “knock-off languages”, don’t you think?

Anyways, you can also see the original responses to this post at my old blog at: http://jroller.com/page/rob/?anchor=whats_next_after_java

And I see you responded the first time around, too, Brian. :)

JRuby is far from abandoned. There are plenty of commits and fixes. A few showstoppers for the next point release has held up its release but it will be out with the next couple of weeks (Last release was in April). The goal is to put out a fresh release once every 2-3 months so we do not have the appearance of being abandoned, but I suspect that may not be enough….