Last week I asked my social media network to help choose my destiny by suggesting which language I should study next. In all, I received 15 responses. Thanks to everyone that contributed to this.

When I put the survey together I hadn’t completely decided how I’d select a winner. Would I select based on the number of votes or would there be a really compelling reason to select something with only a single vote? After inspecting the responses, it looks like Haskell is the clear winner. To be honest, I was really hoping to get more votes and reasons for Erlang but it’s really hard to ignore the fact that Haskell received a third of the votes. What really surprised me was the number of “Other” votes and the languages that were suggested.

For those interested, I’ve listed the results along with comments below. Now to find some time to start studying Haskell!

Results

Haskell

• Pure functional is a natural next step after mostly functional F#
• Going from Haskell to F# is frustrating. But the other way around is actually compelling
• Typeclasses/-kinds, purity, better type inference and pattern matching, higher-kinded/ranked polymorphism, lean syntax.

Other

• Rust – Speed of C, but more safe. Language is still under development, so you could go 2/2 on being a hipster.
• Idris/Coq/Agda – Dependent types
• Elixir – Erlang on steroids/for the masses.
• Rebol – Rich built-in types, homoiconicity, consistency, cross-platform, small, zero-install just download and run, super easy GUI development built-in (at least Rebol 2.7..) and then you can write a book on it too!

Python

• Market demand
• Popular choice among UNIX crowd, has a .NET implementation, can show how people unfamiliar with .net interact with windows with it.

Erlang

• Immutable by default
• Let it fail thinking vs catch-all errors
• Functional

Ruby

• Ignore the rails stuff, ruby is a wonderful language with a lot of interesting features (modules, execution model, monkey patching aka nothing is closed, blocks).

R

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