The Pragmatic Programmers have suggested that you get a lot out of learning a new programming language a year. I’ve been doing programming for a long time, and though I’ve learned a number of languages over the years, but I think I’m still behind. This year I’ve been learning Ruby (which I’m loving). For next year, I’ll need to learn something else - and like many, I think I’ll choose Erlang. For kicks, here is what I’ve touched so far:

1. Forth
2. Basic (Commodore Vic 20, C64, Pet, Osborne, AmigaBasic probably other versions I’ve forgotten)
3. Logo
4. Pilot
5. Comal
6. 8502 Assembly
7. COBOL
8. C
9. Pascal
10. QuickBasic
11. Lisp
12. FORTRAN
13. CA Realizer
14. Ada
15. C++
16. REALbasic
17. Visual Basic
18. PHP
19. Java
20. Python
21. Javascript
22. Ruby

Which would be a pretty good list except I started back in ‘83 or so. I’ve definitely not done as well in recent years. My experience with Ruby has definitely re-energized my interest in languages.