I’m pretty much a polyglot programmer. Working as a Developer Advocate, I often find that I’m asked to help developers to integrate with our API in a language of their choice, but maybe one I don’t know so well. This is one of the coolest and most fun parts of my job, by the way - I get to learn new stuff, or go back and sharpen older skills, all the time. Most days, if I’m coding, I find myself in the worlds of Python, JavaScript, or C#.
From my DEV bio / profile page sidebar:
Generally capable across a range of languages... grew up on BBC BASIC and C, migrated into Perl, PHP, Java, Python, JS etc. with side dabblings in Ruby, Swift, Go and others...
I know quite a few things, but I rarely spend long enough in a programming space, to get to know it really deeply.
Most recently, I’ve been learning about MicroPython, and sharing my progress in a series here on DEV.
This year, I really want to do something with Rust. It has been interesting to me for a while, but I’ve yet to do anything with it. I admit, Jack Dorsey’s Tweet got me more interested…
I’ve done quite a bit with C in the past, working on things for Linux and GNOME, and I still do a lot of IoT and microprocessor stuff, so I think I’d like to spend time with Rust this year.
Tell me what you want to learn in 2022, and why? I’d love to chat about it in the comments!
Top comments (23)
Elixir. I've tried it 2 years ago and it didn't feel good. But now I'm having a great time with it. I was stuck with understanding that Elixir processes are not the same as OS processes, once I got it and that each dependency in most cases is a mini application itself, it actually feels nice to do stuff in Elixir.
Ah this is interesting, I have a former coworker who wrote a lot of Erlang, and when I was at Pivotal there was a log of Erlang in RabbitMQ that was in our portfolio - Elixir (and Erlang by association, I know they are different languages!) is not something I've explored yet. One for the list...
somewhat related, this was just mentioned in a Slack group I use...
I’m really into Rust, I’m treating it as setting myself up for the future as it has fairly similar concepts to Scala so would be a nice jumping off point if I wanted to move away from #Frontend.
Rust was great to begin with, the docs are super helpful and it clicked after some trial and error. I tackled a medium sized port of a Deno / typescript library I wrote that does some OAuth type stuff - that was tougher but mostly got stuck around packages / folder structure than actual code.
Recently I managed to compile my app in GitHub as the first step to CI for my side-project, it’s verrry cool esp for a learning project.
Thanks for posting this, Matt! Yep, I think we've briefly mentioned Rust to one another in the recent past. Good to know how folks are learning about it (a friend on Twitter mentioned the Rust book by Tim McNamara, which I am going to check out).
I'd like to revisit my Ruby for sure, I feel very out-of-touch with that ecosystem lately! Lisp is so useful in multiple contexts (gaming and graphics package scripting)... I've always been a
viperson overemacs(different discussion, I know, I know!!) so I never got into it in that context.I am learning Go currently, and would love to dip my toes in Rust as well in the near future.
Nice! I used Go a lot more about 8-9 years ago, and then wandered away from it (partly because my work has me helping more developers using e.g. Python and Java and JavaScript). I just tried out TinyGo yesterday for the ESP32 board I'm working with, and that was pretty cool.
Damn, I have never heard of it. I do have an Arduino lying around which I am guilty of never playing around with, because I don't like the language. Perhaps I could try building something now with it and TinyGo. Thanks!
I want to learn lua better, specially to improve my neovim and possibly to develop something new. Neovim with lua is very fast and extending the editor with it is awesome!
Lua is really neat. This reminded me to look at NodeMCU to see whether I can get it to run on this ESP32 board, to run Lua code on it. Good thing to brush up on! I didn't know you can extend Neovim with Lua - TIL.
Oh! Also, Pico-8 uses Lua, and I keep meaning to try that!
For me C programming language is the best way to start programming.. cause behind the many popular higher level language:
For more reference read this:
Which Programming Language to Learn and Why?
Elisp, to get better at Emacs.
Swift because I’m trying to make some app versions of web games I’m making.
Nice, Swift is a pretty friendly language.
Yeah I’ve heard that!
This series of 100 programming languages in a speed run is constantly fascinating to me, as well!
I'm getting bored with frontend stack and trying Go, Rust is definitely after that as I'm planning to expand my skills to backend.
Always be learning! Great to hear :-)