Functional Languages on the Horizon

The usefulness of functional languages is really starting to go mainstream now. In the past, I've learned Haskell, Scheme, and Ruby, and I'm studying Scheme again now. Trying to learn every technology is impossible so I'm going to stick with Scheme right now because of the great books that are available for learning it.

Practical reasons for learning some functional languages:

Scala

• Lift Web Framework: http://liftweb.net/
• Java interoperability
  

Haskell

• New O'Reilly book, "Real-World Haskell": http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/
• Most modern functional language in semi-mainstream use.
  

Scheme/Lisp

• Great books: "Lisp in Small Pieces", "The Scheme Programming Language" (by Kent Dybvig), and "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs".
• Good, cross-platform IDE: DrScheme
• Ability to leverage knowledge for Arc (Paul Graham's language which will almost certainly have a large following due to his popularity)

PLT Scheme

I'm learning Scheme right now in my spare time to expand my programming ability and hopefully find use for it at work. PLT Scheme seems to be a good implementation: it has a large library, and a good cross-platform IDE. Also, the PLT Scheme user community is large and active compared to many other Scheme implementations.

There are also some cool extensions for it:

• Typed Scheme: typing on top of PLT Scheme
• DivaScheme: environment to improve PLT Scheme

And some other good links:

• Planet Scheme: a aggregation of Scheme blogs
• Keybinding 101 in PLT Scheme

Hello, World!

No better way to start a blog about computer programming than with the immortal words of every programmer's first foray into a new programming language. This blog will mostly be for my own benefit and future reference, but if someone finds it useful, all the better!