What Niche Language to Learn?

For pure fun (pun intended), Haskell. Less pure, more practical fun, F# or OCaml.

Semi-practical fun, Clojure, Racket/Scheme, or other Lisp.

More academic fun, Pony or Clean. Less academic Rust.

Tired of Ruby/Rails or similar frameworks and would like something more distributed/concurrent? Elixir/Phoenix framework.

If you don't have a strong grasp of SQL and a specific database (e.g. PostgreSQL or MySQL), learn it deeply separate from your libraries/frameworks. Want to get off the beaten path? CockroachDB or other NewSQL datastore.

What languages, niche or otherwise, do you already know?

In the absence of context, I would suggest Forth or Prolog, as they are sufficiently different from any mainstream language.

Of course, Lisps and Schemes are always fun, and I think Racket sets itself apart from those with its language making capabilities. Logo is also very fun, but it is essentially a Lisp/Scheme. There are a lot of neat older books using Logo in various domains.

Pharo is also a fun choice.

Q#

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/quantum/overview-what...

You could learn Zig, or Rust, or Lisp. There are many :-)

I'm in no position to give you any pointers but on my list of languages to learn are:

* APL/J/BQN array programming language of some sort

* Some LISP type language

I'm not a professionally programming, mostly a novice but useful languages I did learn, as at work I'm stuff on Windows, VBA and Autohotkey. I'm proficient in both but no expert.

Probabilistic programming languages.

Stan in particular has a very healthy job market behind it.

There's also Pyro, Infer.NET, Turing.jl and a few others.

I'd learn at least 1 from every major paradigm (see https://madhadron.com/posts/seven_languages.html), but in particular I'd say Haskell and APL can be pretty mind bending.

Autohotkey or Power Automate Desktop

Pascal corrects a lot of the flaws in C/C++. Free Pascal and the IDE built in it, Lazarus, are cross platform and open source.

If you really want to stretch your mind, learn Ladder Logic programming, and VHDL or Verilog.

You should also have a deep knowledge of Excel.

For fun: Nim or any modern Lisp.

For profit: COBOL.

SQL and pgsql.

The set-based paradigm is something that most developers seem blind to.

If you're not adverse to a little OOP, Pony is a very interesting language with a nice syntax and a particular niche in solving concurrency problems.

Postscript.

Its a wacky stack based language, loads of fun, hard to master and almost entirely useless as a general purpose tool.

Although if you don't know sql, just learn that.

You can try learning Neoxam. It won't be fun and it won't get you a job. It will be very niche though.

Im not sure its a language but ive enjoyed autohotkey for Macros and automating repetitive mousemovement :)

Lisp

If I had one of those krell brain boosting machines I'd learn CUDA.

XPath 3.1

It is a w3c standard for e.g. JSON processing

For culture and fun: GolfScript

Haskell

rust, nim, crystal, d

forth, lua, nim

Solidity or anything smart contract related

Elm

TLA+

Sanskrit?

Ruby.

Crystal