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Re:What Toy Apps would you write in order to learn a language? by Geee on Monday February 21, 2011 @08:39AM (#2245339)
A simple raytracer is a nice and interesting way to learn the basics of a language. You'll probably learn basic data structures, objects, recursion, file i/o etc.
Re:What Toy Apps would you write in order to learn a language? by kbob on Monday February 21, 2011 @03:30PM (#2247029)
I found Minilight yesterday. It is both more and less than a ray tracer, being a global illumination renderer. It was created as an exercise to learn new languages. Its creator has implemented it in C, Scheme, Scala, C++, OCaml, Lua, Ruby and Flex 2. Others have implemented it in Python, Java, F#, C#, and Clojure.

http://www.hxa.name/minilight/