

Seven Languages: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages - j_baker
http://www.pragprog.com/news/seven-languages-in-seven-weeks-now-in-beta?1012149

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abreu_alexandre
I bought the book and love it so far; it is not yet complete but the intents
of the author are clearly geared toward a rather deep (limited by space
though) review of the selected languages;

all this is supported by meaningful projects to get passed the syntax and have
a feel of the core decisions that underline every language,

good work so far!

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delluminatus
Interesting language choices. I suppose they were picked to provide an
introduction to various paradigms. Let's see:

Ruby - Dynamically typed, scripting language

Io - Not sure. Smalltalk-esque object orientation, I guess.

Prolog - Crazy logic programming!

Scala - Functional? JVM? (does he really need this and haskell and Clojure?)

Erlang - I guess this is like a demonstration of concurrency and actors? Or
something?

Clojure - Woo! A lisp dialect!

Haskell - Functional, strongly-typed.

I think I would take out Scala and put in something more imperative and
different, like Go, C#, or Lua. I might also replace Ruby with Python. I
learned Ruby as my first language and I find myself using Python a lot more
anyways (Ruby is sexier though, I admit). The idea itself might not be sound.
(A language a week? Talk about a crash course!)

I'm tempted to get it anyways. It's a unique approach, so props to the author
for that.

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plesn
Another book taking this kind of horizontal approach explains different
programming paradigms rather than concrete languages: "Concepts, Techniques,
and Models of Computer Programming" by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi
(<http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html>). It is IMHO a deeply illuminating
book.

~~~
gtani
Yeah, CTMCP is becoming a SICP-like acronym. Here's the for Dummies version

<http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/VanRoyChapter.pdf>

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Tichy
I always wanted to learn Prolog. Is there still a use for it these days?

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weaksauce
I just learned a bit of it for a class in programming languages(paradigms,
assembly(simple), prolog, haskell, perl) prolog is a bit of a pain to work
with if the problem is mildly imperative in nature. It is very useful if the
problem is or can be written in a declarative fashion. That's just my take on
it from learning a bit of it for a class though. I am sure if you are a
veteran at it you will be able to make it bend to might.

