2016 Programming Languages Focus

I am an avid learner and I tend to switch my focus between a lot of things.

It is also hard to decide which programming language I should try to master more.

Let’s do a quick analysis

Ruby: This is my favourite scripting language. Great community and mature. I should definitely keep it in my tool belt and continue improving my skills on it.
Functional programming: functional programming is amazing. What’s more amazing is how few really understand it. I hear people talking about monads and monoids, talking about chaining functions, recursion, but it is not enough. Compared to Object oriented programming, It is a new way of thinking. I should try to master it. I see two contenders, Elixir and Haskell. Haskell is the purest functional programming around so from a learning point it is the best one to pick. Elixir is more trendy but I have yet to see a really killing app made with Elixir. At the same time Dave Thomas is strongly promoting Elixir and the Ruby world tends to favour Elixir except that… Thoughbot like Haskell… Pretty hard choice here :)

Let’s get some stats
- Reddit
  - Haskell 21,637 subscribers - 8 years old
  - Elixir 3,044 subscribers - 3 years old
  - Erlang 4,577 subscribers - 8 years old
- Stack Overflow
  - Haskell 26382
  - Erlang 6183
  - Elixir 1421
- Tiobe Index (February 2016)
  - 40 Haskell 0.267%
  - 42 Erlang 0.231%
  - Elixir is not listed
- Google Trends
  - Haskell 49
  - Erlang 22
  - Elixir 15
JavaScript. JavaScript is certainly the hottest language around. Node of course is really popular but the last trend are on JS frameworks like Angular 2 and React. Both Angular2 and React are good options.
Lisp. Essential with Emacs. It is also a functional programming language so it is refreshing. I should continue writting custom functions in Emacs with it.
CSS and SVG. I love design and usability. Some amazing experts are around here. I should definitely continue reading Lea Verou book and do my own experiments.