What to learn? Lisp or OCaml or…? [closed]

Neither Lisp nor OCaml is super far afield from what you already know. Here are four suggestions chosen partly for intrinsic interest and partly to stretch your horizons.

  • A logic programming language, probably Prolog. I haven’t found good materials online, but the book The Art of Prolog by Sterling and Shapiro is excellent. The more basic textbook by Clocksin and Mellish is also good. The main point of interest is programming with relations, not functions.

  • A pure object-oriented language, either
    Smalltalk or Self. If you’ve only used hybrid object-oriented languages you’ll be amazed how beautiful pure object-orientation can be. I’ve linked to the Squeak implementation of Smalltalk. I personally would recommend learning Smalltalk before tackling Self; there’s a very large and active community and the software is well developed. Self stands on Smalltalk’s shoulders and is an even more inspiring design, but the community is much smaller. For those who have access to the ACM Digital library I recommend the excellent talk by Dave Ungar at HOPL-III; the paper is also pretty good.

  • The Icon programming language has two great things going for it; a powerful and unusual evaluation model with implicit backtracking, and a user-extensible model of string processing that beats regular expressions all hollow. I’m sorry to say that Icon has never quite kept pace with the times, and of all my recommendations it is the least practical. In fact I fear the language is moribund. But it will stretch your mind almost as much as Haskell, and in wildly different directions. Icon is still very useful for string-processing tasks of modest size.

    You can read about Icon string processing in an article by Ralph Griswold from Computer Journal.

  • The Lua programming language is my last and least radical suggestion. Its interest is not so much in novel language features or paradigms but in the superb engineering of the language and its implementation. Lua occupies a number of niches, including scripting, gaming, string processing, and lightweight functional programming. But its main point of interest is its seamless integration with C, and to get the full benefit, you should bind a C library into Lua.

    The HOPL-III web site also contains an excellent talk and paper about Lua.

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