I attended a No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium a few weeks ago. One of the main emphasis during the weekend was learning new languages that are available on the JVM. While there are a variety of reasons that we need to take time to learn new programming languages, one of the most profound is learning to think about problems differently.

Paradigm Shift

When I entered the development scene I was immersed in Object Oriented programming. As a result, I tend to think of good design in objects. A few years ago I began to learn and apply Groovy. With closures I was able to bleed into the realm of Functional programming. This gave me a small taste of a new paradigm. I thought of new ways to solve problems that I couldn’t see with Java. I can only imagine how much more I could learn if I developed exclusively in a Functional language for several months.
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