Starting 7 languages in 7 weeks

So I went down to Chapters (yes I still like to actually walk into book stores) to go find Rest In Practice, but instead came out with 7 Languages in 7 Weeks.
This has two very useful purposes for me. One I feel that learning a bit about a lot of different languages helps teach perspective when solving programming problems in any language. Second, that means, assuming I stick to the schedule, that I will have 1 blog post on a new language for each of the next 7 weeks.

7L7W covers Ruby (which I know a bit of), Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure and Haskell. What I love about the authors choice of languages is that these are all fairly unusual choices, though not completely obscure, and would be unlikely to be encountered in your typical, workin-for-a-livin software development.

For each language I’m going to do a little movie review of the language, summarizing it, laying out what aspects I like about the language, anything I didn’t like and why I think it’s cool (or perhaps why I think it’s not so cool). I also want to talk a bit about what each language teaches me about programming at a higher level that can be applied more broadly.

I know it’s been quiet around here so hopefully a little “light” reading will help me break out of this rut.