Virtuous Code

I’ve fallen off the wagon of late in learning “a language a year” (as The Pragmatic Programmer advises). I have a long list of languages to learn, but I thought I’d try and narrow it down to a top five. Here goes:

• Io – the more I work in OO the more I am drawn to prototype-based OO; and all the Io code samples I’ve seen are beautiful.
• Smalltalk – one of those languages I feel like I already know from many years of tangential exposure, but it would be nice to be able to build a real app in it.
• Scala – learning Haskell left behind a lingering itch to play with powerful type systems that help rather than hinder, and Scala seems like a pragmatic environment in which to do so.
• Clojure – the early buzz is growing on this one. Good documentation for a young language, and I like a lot of the design decisions.

• PROLOG – the only language in this list which would actually expose me to a programming paradigm I am not terribly familiar with.