The Great Language Holiday
During my month off from school, I plan on doing two main things: playing games and starting to learn three new languages. As for which three languages I’ll begin to dabble in, they might not be exactly what you’d expect. I plan on dealing with 1 human language and 2 programming languages. These are:
Japanese: Considering I spent 6 years taking Spanish classes and don’t consider myself anywhere near fluent, I don’t plan on becoming a master of Japanese in a month. My goal here is just to learn the two syllabaries of katakana and hiragana. No real comprehension of words or anything, just being able to read (in Japanese) stuff that’s written is my goal. I’ve had the books and stuff since summer of 2004 but just haven’t ever spent the time to really go through them.
Python: Java is the language I have the best grip on, C# I can now handle with a reference available, but I’ve yet to add a good “scripting” language to my repertoire. PHP is a little too web-centric for me, so the choice was really between Python and Ruby. Since Python is the more established language currently, I chose it to learn first, but I plan on picking up Ruby also before too long.
Perl: Also in the scripting language category falls Perl, and this is a very recent addition to my list. Basically, a combination of it being essentially universal on web servers and apparently useful for the Unix class at UTD which I’ll probably take next fall, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to learn it.
Japanese is on there primarily for my interest in gaming; being able to (eventually) import games would be nice for those that never make it to the US. As for the other two, for people who program being familiar with a wide array of languages allows for the best one for the situation to be chosen. Every break from now on I’ll try to pick up one or two more, and the ones that really seem to interest me the most I’ll learn more in depth via books.