I have spent about a year away from writing code and I miss it. I want to learn something cool and fun in my leisure time.<p>What are your recommendations HN?
You're going to hate this answer, but after a couple of years of Node/Express development I'm really enjoying writing Asp.NET in C# using Visual Studio 2013.
Scala and Wicket. Writing web apps is a dream. And I'm worried I won't get to do it in 2014, because the world has moved over to javascript, whose type system is 10 years behind scala's.
Scala - great language with an expressive type system (many evenings and nights spent reading blogs/books/code trying to adopt its power), I also enjoyed learning functional programming with it.<p>Akka - Scala/Java actor framework for better concurrency.<p>Angular.js - very powerful js framework with dependency injection, 2-way bindings. I am more a backend guy so I haven't dived deeply into its Tao yet.
Answer Set Programming, specifically via the Potassco tools: <a href="http://potassco.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://potassco.sourceforge.net/</a><p>Combines the solver goodness of modern SAT and CSP solvers with the modeling-language richness of classic Prolog.
Laravel is "the PHP framework for web artisans." It's powerful, yet easy-to-use CLI makes development, testing, and deployment a breeze! Check it out at <a href="http://laravel.com" rel="nofollow">http://laravel.com</a>
Redis. I got back into web programming this year and looked over all the NoSQL databases and it was the only one that really stood out to me. I've even read a bit of the source code and it's all very well done and nice to use.
Mobile Development with Objective-C (for iOS) and Java (for Android). Objective-C has already been mentioned, so I vote for Java. I know I am inviting rants writing Java here, but using Java for Android app development is a lot of fun.
I finally made the jump from Python to Clojure when I needed to really chomp on some data.<p>The world is a better place for me now. Paredit is an absolute dream, and the JVM has shown itself to be truly worthy.
I just wonder why nobody hasn't mentioned C++11 yet :)
( so i'd be the one :P )
Btw, Compilers (almost all of them e.g: clang, gcc) completed all the standard.
Objective-C. I've worked with C, C++, and C#. But objective-C seems to fit my thoughts better. I like how it reads. Currently building iOS/Mac apps with it.