Update 11/23/2020: The ultimate winner for my primary programming language was Racket.

Background

The 2008 Programming Language Plan didn’t go as well as I hoped, so I’m regrouping for another go at it. I did make progress learning some Logo and teaching it to my daughters, and I worked through seven chapters of “Programming in Haskell” which was very enjoyable, but I also spent way too much time trying to decide which language(s) to learn without actually learning them.

UPDATE 12/24/08: This article is now out of date. I just installed Ubuntu 8.10, and getting Emacs with nice fonts is now much easier:

1. Install the emacs-snapshot-gtk package
2. Edit ~/.Xresources to have Emacs.font: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono–10
3. xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources

This has been a long time in coming. Paul Graham and Robert Morris have released an initial version of the Arc programming language.

• Announcement
• Language Web Site
• Software
• Forum

I’ve learned a number of programming languages since I began programming 25 years ago. Earlier in my career, my choice of which programming language to learn was largely driven by external factors such as a class or job requirement, or the expectation of job demand in the future.

I’ve been teaching my eldest daughter to program in Logo over the summer. Brian Harvey has posted PDF files for a set of excellent books on learning to program in Logo on his web site. The Berkeley version of Logo he’s produced is really excellent. It’s not just your typical turtle graphics language; it has arrays, macros, file processing, graphics, etc.