It's a question that is evergreen, but especially prevalent at the turn of the year: what skills should I learn this year?

It's not just programming languages either, there are a slew of areas of life where skills are desirable but you wonder how to go about it or whether it's worth the effort.

And if there's anything I've learned it's not "should I learn it" but "how much does it cost to learn it?"

💸 Cost of starting

Some skills are more expensive to pick up, and wondering whether you want to spend a lot without even knowing if you'll be sticking with it is a reasonable reason for pause.

For example, if you wanted to pick up a musical instrument skill, there's the outlay of buying or renting said instrument upfront. To learn piano, you need regular access to a piano for practice, and those things don't come cheap, so it's fairly reasonable to um and ah about it. But if you wanted to pick up an instrument with a piano-layout keyboard (albeit limited), you could probably manage a melodion and see if the layout works - it's cheap, it's portable, and a lot of beginner piano theory and tutorials apply to it.

Conversely, there are skills which cost little to get started with - cooking certain types of foods if you already have a stove/oven, or take up drawing (pencils and eraser, and a stack of A4/letter paper is easy to come by), and then scour youtube for a variety of tutorials - try drawing chibis to start with?.

Similarly there are many options and approaches for learning foreign spoken languages, ranging from free (apps and meetups) to pay-for (courses) or even specialization (degrees) which you can approach little by little as you find your feet.

Last year I took up foraging and fermenting, and whilst there was a little cost in books (I have many now) and jars (I just bought some more the other day), it was mostly a quick and cheap set of skills I took great joy from, and intend still to do this year. Mostly, gaining a reason and actual pleasure from heading out into the woods.

It's not just about computers - anything you can do to spend time away from the screen is immensely important for your continued good health to come back refrehsed 🌲

💻 What Programming Language?

But back to dev talk. What programming language is worth learning ?

I'll cut to the chase and answer this: ⭐ any you feel curious about ⭐ . If you can set aside 30min in any given day, or every other day, you'll get enough of a flavour of a language to decide whether you want to pursue it. Heck, dedicate an hour to the language its base systems, and if you're already mad at it after that, just stop.

Because, with very few exceptions, getting started with a new programming language is near zero cost . Aside from the time you need to set aside, if you already program, you have the required equipment and skill to just launch into it.

Sure, it may pay to read up on the languages that have piqued your interest upfront, and once you've done that you will probably have a good idea which ones you do want to dedicate an hour to and which are already just outright not a fit for you.

And if you come away with a short list and thinking "this one or that one or the other," I would wager that the obvious answer should be: all of them , in sequence.

My use case requirements are

• command line
• ideally compiled
• preferably without external runtime requirements

My other use case (as a separate effort) is

• back end
• simple/minimal build and hosting requirements

Last year I doubled-down on Zig, as idiosyncratic as it is to me coming from scirpting languages (and very much because of it), and I am pursuing Go as well, as a nicer middle ground.

Between what I have experience from C and Zig, I am not even considering C at this point. Maybe later, but I do not see the benefit, given my language selection as it stands. I had a quick look at Kotlin from afar (perusing websites) and decided I had no interest.

For web, PHP was also on the docket for a short moment, but I don't feel I want to go there yet; I feel more relevance looking first into Django and Flask before I return to PHP (I used to do php3 projects, way back when...)

🔨 Mini-projects

Once you get past the first hour of each language, I reckon there will be some you'll think "nope, I'm done here" - and that's fine. That's the whole point of this in the end. After which you're left perhaps with one or two languages that remain contenders for Your Next Thing. What next?

One of the questions I hear from a couple of friends is, how do you even choose a side project? My take is, what's a thing you wish there was a program for? What's the simplest thing that program would do?

I live on the command line, so this question is usually easier for me, barring having to do more complex things (I don't (yet) do media processing, or have need to rich GUI stuff). But I do often want to say organising the last few photos or MP3's (my backup drives are in disarray since forever and I need to wrangle them to sensibility...) , and I am often wishing websites would publish their content sensibly (web scraping and RSS feed corralling comes to mind).

Try to think, how would a command line program do 80% of what I need to do? Or for GUI projects, how would I get the thing done with a couple simple widgets and buttons? And take it from there.

Aim to scratch a particular itch, reduce the feature set to minimum, and have at.

(As an example dump: I am currently trying to rewrite my bash-builder project (extending the lenker), I have a tarball-dependencies project inspired by Zig's build.zig.zon file, did an /etc/os-release reader for something simple, and pondered a PATH management utility . For web stuff, I have a player registry I ideated once when thinking about cross-server stuff for Luanti, but I have yet to properly sit down to. All of which I will likely try revisiting in various languages as the need arises.)

📋 What languages for me this year?

If you really want to see a language list from some nobody on t'interweb, here's where I'm at -

Last year I had a stab at:

• 🦀 Rust - ❌ rejected - just too unwieldy to the value it woul bring, to me
• ⚡ Zig - ✅ retained - low level but just striaghtforward enough, so far as I have been able to see
• 🎯 Dart - 🤔 to revisit - specific to GUI/app writing, not yet having a use case
• 🦫 Go - ✅ retained - good balance of being accessible and being machine-code compiled, for CLI use
• ☕ TypeScript - ❌ rejected - very not a fan

This year I intend to:

• Continue with Zig and Go - I want to gain familiarity with a systems programming language, and a systemsy language that still has some extra fluff.
• Reignite my Lua skills with Love2D, and maybe a little bit into [Luanti][launti]
• Get more hours into Django (yeah not a language, but furthering my Python mastery)

🎉 Voila

It's a relatively low cost to entry to try out a language when you already have a computer and an Internet connection, and well worth sinking an hour or two into multiple languages and trying to understand why they work the way they do, and what new ways of thinking they can bring to you.

It's not "should I try X or Y" but "I've tried X and I've tried Y - how much more time shall I spend on each?"