tail -f development.log

I came across an article on Michael Minella’s blog the other day about continually adding new tools to the programming tool box. Specifically, Michael references on of the tenets of the Pragmatic Programmer to learn at least one new programming language every year.

That got me thinking and challenged me to pick up another language this year. I’ve been doing Ruby development exclusively for close to three years now and have really let my PHP level of expertise slide a bit. Other than a bit of JavaScript and some PHP for Wordpress plugins and themes, Ruby is all of done recently.

The language that I really want to learn and get into is Objective-C, mostly because I’d like to dabble a bit in Cocoa development for OS X. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve done any kind of desktop app development and I’d like to at least stay up-to-date in that world.

Ultimately though, I decided to really learn Perl this year. Now, I know a bit of Perl and have written some of it in the past, but I really am not as strong with Perl as I’d like to be and I think its probably one of the best languages to really have a good grasp on. Considering that the year is already halfway over, it helps to pick a language that I am already a bit familiar with as well.

So, what language(s) are you learning this year to stay sharp?