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5 years ago
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title = "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks"
date = 2019-07-16
[taxonomies]
tags = ["books", "reviews", "bruce a tate", "clojure", "haskell", "io",
"prolog", "scala", "erlang", "ruby", "it", "1 star"]
5 years ago
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[GoodReads summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7912517-seven-languages-in-seven-weeks):
5 years ago
You should learn a programming language every year, as recommended by The
Pragmatic Programmer. But if one per year is good, how about Seven Languages
in Seven Weeks? In this book you'll get a hands-on tour of Clojure, Haskell,
Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby. Whether or not your favorite language is
on that list, you'll broaden your perspective of programming by examining
these languages side-by-side. You'll learn something new from each, and best
of all, you'll learn how to learn a language quickly.
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A couple of random thoughts about this book:
First off, you have the idea that, for each language the author would spend
one week (I'll not get into the fact that each "week" has 3 days only). This
is a great idea: How much of the concepts of a programming language can you
capture in just one week. Are the interfaces good? Are they simple and easy to
understand? The fact is, the author did not spend one week on each language.
In the Clojure chapter, he mentions that he got the idea after a month. So
instead of trying to capture the good and bad points in one week -- which,
again, it's a good thing, so one can understand how "ergonomic" a language is
-- the author decided the reader should only take one week per language.
Second, there is a huge about of "obvious", "obviously" and "simple". Sure, it
may seem obvious for the author, but most of the time, things are not obvious
for people who never saw anything related.
Not only there is an abuse of "obvious" things, sometimes the author seems to
either not understand some concepts of the language or tries to simplify an
explanation to the point it sounds wrong -- and I just realized that 'cause
I've read books about some of the languages.
And there are times when the author shows a piece of code, with something
completely new, and forgets to explain what that new thing means. I'm glad
I've read books about Clojure and Haskell before, otherwise I'd never
understand what the thing really was.
On the general, it's a book about seven languages. Instead of reading this
book, I'd suggest getting the list of languages and going after them in other
ways instead of reading this.