lucisferre

“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. —Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare”

Starting 7 Languages in 7 Weeks

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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.

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