Seven Languages in Seven* Weeks

(in which the author greets an invisible audience)

So I’m starting a blog... or rather a journal, as I go through Bruce Tate’s Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. I had been anticipating this book for quite  and rather than just read through it, I figured I wanted get my hands dirty and actually work through the book to get a more hands on feeling for the languages discussed.

The languages in question are in fact programming languages, and the aptly titled book goes through seven of them: Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure and Haskell. I got excited about this book precisely because it intends to cover a wide variety of programming paradigms and models. I have also been keeping an eye out on a few of the languages included**. This blog is primarily a personal notebook as I look at these languages, but I thought it may be interesting to a few people I know, and figured making it public could help keep me motivated. I am not an expert in any of these languages (that is indeed a great deal of the point) and certainly don't expect to be an expert by the end of it.

The book organizes each language tour into three ‘days’,and I’ll probably organize my posts in the same way and write one for each ‘day’. One modification to the plan is that I will be skipping the Ruby chapter. I love ruby and it is the language I use most at my day job, so there isn’t really much need to go into it in this series. I will probably replace ruby with one of the following other languages that I am curious about: Mirah, Go or CoffeeScript.

Code produced while going through the book will be on github.

The first language up is Io, I already have a few of those posts ready and they should be up here soon. Cheers!

*base to be determined

**Scala & Clojure in particular, in my quest to find an alternate (productive & performant) JVM language. Mirah, not included in this book, also fits that category.

Posted On 3rd January 2011

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