[math-dev]

I say best way to learn is to start coding and break stuff :-)

Also once one gets more experienced, its better to decouple the language from programming concepts like object oriented programming, continuations, avoiding side effects in functional programming, etc. Useful to read books like SICP and algorithm books, then learn multiple languages and you will see they are not that different overall.

I recommend learning Lisp or Scheme or related languages because they have a lot of good conceptual resources to learn from. But maybe that’s my background talking, I loved SICP. I learnt SO much from studying Common Lisp in the last year. Of course it helps that it has a great language specification.

In terms of choosing a language, standard library matters a lot. Hence the explosion of JS due to NPM and also being in browser. I’m suprised SWIFT is not more popular, given Apple’s place in the ecosystem. I really liked programming in Swift, very enjoyable language. And it has generic functions too!