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POWhat general purpose language should I learn next?
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  1. POWhat general purpose language should I learn next?
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    copied!<p>I'm currently participating in a programming contest (<a href="http://contest.github.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://contest.github.com</a>), which has as goal, to create a recommendation engine. I started coding in <strong>ruby</strong>, but soon realised it wasn't fast enough for the algorithms I had in mind. So I switched to <strong>C</strong>, which is the only non-scripting language I know. It was fast, of course, but I cringed every time I had to write a <code>for</code> loop, to go through the elements of an array (which was very often).</p> <p>That's when it dawned: I wish I knew a fast, yet high-level language, to program all these intensive computations with ease!</p> <p>So I looked at my options, but there are a lot of options these days! Here the best candidates I've found over the months, with something which bothers me about each of them (that hopefully you can clear up):</p> <ul> <li><strong>Clojure</strong>: I'm not sure I want to get into the whole <code>lisp</code> thing, I like my syntax and cruft. I could be convinced, though.</li> <li><strong>Haskell</strong>: Too academic? I don't really care for <em>pure</em> functional, I just want something which works. But it has nice syntax, and I don't mind static typing.</li> <li><strong>Scala</strong>: Weird language. I tried it out but it feels messy/inconsistent to me.</li> <li><strong>OCaml</strong>: Also wondering if this is too academic? The poor concurrency support also bothers me.</li> <li><strong>Arc</strong>: Paul Graham's lisp, too obscure, and again, I'm not sure I want to learn a lisp. But I trust this man!</li> </ul> <p>Any advice? I really like the functional languages, for their ability to manipulate lists with ease, but I'm open to other options too. I'd like something about as fast as Java..</p> <p>The kind of things I want to be able to do with lists are like (ruby): </p> <pre><code>([1, 2, 3, 4] - [2, 3]).map {|i| i * 2 } # which results in [2, 8] </code></pre> <p>I would also prefer an open-source language.</p> <p>Thanks</p>
 

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