12 NEW PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES TO LEARN..
12 NEW PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES TO LEARN.... Even if you never use them, understanding new languages makes you a better coder. R uby was Dillon Kearns’ first love, but now, there’s a new language in his life. “Elm has really changed my perspective,” he said. “When I was working in Ruby, I’d see code that’s verbose and I’d be like: ‘Let’s clean this up. Let’s make it read more like English or like a domain language created for this task.’ Now when I look at Ruby, I realize those are the things that slowed me down.” There’s a tradeoff between sleek code that’s implicit and wordy code that’s explicit. A younger version of Kearns enjoyed the challenge of keeping track of what’s happening behind the code. Then Elm came along, and his aesthetic evolved. The functional programming concepts that power languages like Elm have been gaining popularity among developers — why worry about changing states when you can perform a clear-cut series of transformations, the thinking goes. Many ...