I say that you should find some interesting project, possibly something related to some desktop environment like Gnome, KDE, sway, cosmic and so on. There are multiple fun/interesting projects around them. Then pick a small and manageable task, use that to learn the language that project uses.

I find Cosmic to be a very interesting desktop project, and they use Rust if that would be of interest.

C.

How about COB-

No joke languages.

Oh…

While it’s related to your job and not very new compared to your current stack, it’s very worth it to learn typescript. It has a cool type system and makes frontend development sane.

I advise you to learn something different and hard for you. Only this case will help you to grow and realize a lot of new.

• Rust for hard
• Nim for something different
• C for understanding how things work

All these languages are efficient and forget about hype and popularity. Language does not matter if you have what to write with it.

Ada particularly the SPARK subset. It’s approach is quite different than most languages, focusing on minimising errors and correctness. It’s fairly difficult but I like to use it to teach people to actually understand the problem and how to solve it before they ever write the code.

I’m a huge fan of Haskell and (for pragmatic purposes) Purescript. Purescript is hard to find much in the way of documentation but it is so similar to Haskell that the steep learning curve is worth it, IMO. I rarely find a project that I couldn’t accomplish with one or the other or both.

I would suggest Nim, I had a blast learning it and making a small project. It is not a mainstream language, nor is it a joke language.

https://nim-lang.org/

Have you ever wanted to do more with regular expressions? Then give Perl a try.

Odin is quite a fun new language I just started learning. It is meant as a C replacement and comes with a decent standard library and third party library so there is a lot already built that you can use. It also is fully compatible with C and can use C libraries.

Just be warned that documentation is lacking and you will have to read the source code of the standard library from time to time or seek help from their discord.

Scheme, and work through SICP, watch the lectures along with the reading.

I prefer Chez Scheme but there’s many implementations. Chez’s fast and practical, C FFI, large standard library, nice REPL with editor.

I’ll suggest Elixir. It’s a language that runs on the same virtual machine as Erlang, which has proven to be great for ultra-reliable and excellent at managing many, MANY concurrent processes.

Elixir itself builds upon this great foundation with a syntax similar to Ruby, but entirely functional. It’s a delightful language to read and write.

Clojure, it’s a lisp that runs on the jvm and would be quite the shakeup for ya.

If you’re looking for something new, I would recommend you the following list:

• Ruby
• Python
• Erlang
• Elixir
• Gleam
• Zig

No preference order, just a bunch of them I already know or are in my want-to-learn list.

I can recommend Rust - I’m training a few people on it.

And a pure functional programming language like Haskell or Scheme, if you don’t know what functional programming is, or are not comfortable with it. Functional programming needs a different mental approach to traditional (imperative) programming paradigm. Some of the more modern languages like Rust, JS and Python incorporate a lot of functional programming constructs. So it makes sense to learn them.

And a lisp - Common Lisp’s popularity is a public secret. Scheme is also fine. This family is homoiconic (program and data are treated more less the same). The syntax is actually very close to its AST. This gives Lisp unparalleled metaprogramming capabilities - mostly through macros. Macros in traditional languages are nowhere near Lisp Macros.

If it interests you, study a stack based language like Forth or Factor. Though they feel very different from Lisps, they have similar underlying properties. And you get more or less the same advantages.