Choosing a new language
I have been programming primarily--for long stretches, almost exclusively--in Perl for the last 17 years or so. I seem to remember starting to use it around mid-1995, with 5.001--during that long, awkward time between when Perl 5 came out and when the 2nd edition of Programming Perl finally arrived in late 1996.
I've kept with it because I'm fluent in it, I am productive in it, and at this point, I can make it do some fairly absurd things (ask me about writing event-driven servers in Perl, I dare you). In fact, I like the language. I understand the complaints people have about it, but the subset in which I write these days is pretty clear while remaining concise and expressive, and the ecosystem that exists around it is simply unparalleled.
Nonetheless, I think the time has come to move on. The downsides of the language--speed, largely, and lack of good language support for expressing things like parallelism--have started to wear at me. I'm tired of the hoops I have to jump through to do the things I want to do.
So for the last 18 months or so, I've been reading a lot about a number of languages. I don't think I've rejected any out of hand except PHP, though I certainly have some biases. For instance, I am looking for a mainstream language--something like IO, though interesting, does not qualify.
But mainstream isn't everything--I want something that is going to open up new options, that's going to be fun to get immersed in; so I'm not considering things like Ruby or Python because for the most part I think they recapitulate most of the problems I have with Perl (speed, concurrency support) just with different syntax.
In the end, I came down to three options. Node.js, Scala and Haskell. I find that as I've been sitting with the question for the last couple of weeks, though, I've stopped thinking about Node.js as a real option. Though it's fast, and it's got a great ecosystem of software surrounding it, raw event-driven programming doesn't really engage me any more. It was fun for the first year or two I did it, but the idea of moving to an environment where Everything Is A Callback leaves me cold.
So it's down to Scala and Haskell, I think.
As a consequence, I've spent the last week reading Programming in Scala: A Comprehensive Step-by-Step Guide, 2nd Edition by Odersky, Spoon and Venners, and before that I got most of the way through Learn You a Haskell for Great Good by Miran Lipovaca (though I'm going to go back through it now and finish it).
I intend, over the next couple of weeks, to post about my experiences working on using each to write a couple of short (but non-trivial) programs with both of them--ones that, incidentally, I have implemented in Perl already, so I can do a real comparison of code.