When Apple announced Swift last summer I was excited to learn a new programming language. After having programmed almost exclusively in Objective-C (with a bit of Go, JavaScript, C#, Java, and C++ on the side) for two years I thoroughly enjoyed picking up Swift’s new concepts such as functional programming, generics, and values.

Having enjoyed my experiences with Swift, I decided to play with a new programming language each month, so since July 2014 I’ve had a Programming Language of the Month:

• July 2014: Swift
• August 2014: TypeScript
• September 2014: F#
• October 2014: Ruby
• November 2014: Haskell
• December 2014: Prolog
• January 2015: Nim

The amount of work I’ve done in each language has varied hugely. I only did a small amount of work in Prolog to familiarise myself with the basic concepts, but I’ve written semi-large programs in all of the others.

Learning, or at least experimenting with, a new language is a tremendous adventure for any programmer. Its been a valuable experience picking up ideas in a variety of functional, imperative and declarative programming languages. If you’ve got the time, I’d give a PLoTM a try.