I’m planning out my 2015 learning itinerary (read: “stuff I want to learn so I feel like I suck less”), and it’s amazing how many options there are available. I’m still trying to spend time learning more about Ruby’s TDD and just not feeling lost in the proverbial magic of Rails.

But look: up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s functional programming!

My eye has been caught by Elixir, Haskell, Clojure and Erlang. I can’t wait to spend time learning those, but I haven’t even gotten through what I really want to learn regarding Object-Oriented Programming, especially the Ruby-based goals I listed above. It doesn’t help when the Ruby-based companies get out there with the whole, “we’re totally learning Clojure, it’s great”, partly because of the zeitgeist, partly because “ooh, shiny!”

But it’s easy to forget that because we can get distracted by shiny things, that our plans don’t necessarily need to change. I’ve had to add functional programming as something I plan to tackle after getting to a comfort level with Ruby, Rails and TDD that I feel like I’ve leveled up, and am ready to give focused attention on what’s next (and that might not be functional programming, when I get there).