I mentioned my interest in this book awhile back when it was in beta, but over the last few weeks I’ve been working through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate. the languages covered are Ruby, Io, Prologue, Scala, Erlang, Clojure and Haskell, and while he doesn’t aim to make you productive in those languages, he does aim to give you a sense of what each one is aiming to do, and the relative strengths and weaknesses.

The writing style is mostly pretty relaxed and clear, despite associating each language with a character from a movie and pushing the analogies way past breaking point. I found that provided I did each of the exercises and end of chapter challenges, I fairly quickly became pretty proficient at interpreting the code and being able to understand what it meant on sight. This even worked for Prolog, which I actually did at University but managed to scrape through with a pass without really understanding it. This time however, I got it and have kinda fallen in love with its “just the facts” style.

The main criticism I have is that many of the languages are not that different from each other. So many of them were heavily functional, and while that was interesting to get my head around, I think it was over-represented and perhaps some other language approaches could have got a look in. Oh, and if I never see another exercise to generate a fibonacci sequence it’ll be too soon.

That aside, I can recommend this book. It has definitely given me ideas for how I might solve problems differently, even in the languages I use more commonly. It has even made me less offended by Ruby’s symbol idolatry, no small achievement.