One of my ongoing goals over the last few months has been to learn some additional programming languages. At school, I used a lot of Java and C, with a very small smattering of C++ thrown in. I dabbled in Python and bash scripts, although this was more due to me needing to edit / support other people’s scripts than me writing things on my own.
At my internship during school, I got a chance to work on a lot of various pieces of Java. In my current job, I’m working with a fair amount of C# and Javascript (along with a few ASP .NET pieces). However, due to the web nature of the product, I have only touched just a small capacity of the .NET Framework.
I realize that I need to keep working on developing my skills, especially to save my butt in the economy today if my current job doesn’t pan out for whatever reason (I don’t suspect it will, but neither did employees of a lot of other companies). One thought is to continue working on other parts of C#, but I’m not sure if I want to run under Mono or not (at home, I have a MacBook Pro, and I’m not sure I want to run Visual Studio in a virtual machine, or boot up into Windows strictly for programming). I’ve also strongly considered picking up Objective-C (in conjunction with Cocoa), Python, Perl, and Lisp at one point or another. There’s plenty of more esoteric languages out there that I can try out too.
At this point, I’m not sure what I want to go with. I think I’m going to stick with a well-known language, but which one I don’t know. Once I figure it out, though, I’ll try to blog my experiences.
Posted by themoonsofbill 
