7 languages in 7 weeks

June 18, 2011

I have been very lucky in two respects over the last couple of days. Firstly, I had a book recommended to my called 7 languages in 7 weeks. The basic idea is that you’re taken through seven different programming languages in seven weeks. The author skips over things like how to install the environment, what an if statement is and all the other basics which you really should be able to take care of yourself as a professional programmer.

So what you do learn about each of the languages is what it’s good at, how it works, the philosophy behind it, and end up creating a pretty decent program in each (for example, how to solve a sudoku in Prolog).

The second respect in which I’ve been lucky is that there is a study group which has just started which I’m going to get involved in. I’m a couple of days behind at the moment, but luckily the first language covered in the book is Ruby, which I’ve at least taken the interactive tutorial on before, so I’m hoping to catch up with everyone else by the end of the weekend.

I’m extremely excited about what’s to come over the next 7 weeks, I love learning and love the fact that this whole experience is going to be quite intensive. I know that by the end of it, I will by no means be an expert in any of the languages, but I like that fact that I’ll have a solid grounding in 7 interesting languages which are not run-of-the mill. These are: Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure and Haskell.

The thing which I’m perhaps most excited by is that it will be a group effort undertaken by people who are 100% serious about it, and how just how much of a difficult task it will be.

I’ll try to post updates as to how I’m doing as often as I can, but you can also keep track of it on github (and also check out the forks to see how the other participants are doing).

Anyway, time to go and do some more reading about Ruby!