5 ms·

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

62 points by fogus 17y ago

tokenadult 17y ago
http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html
- ErrantX 17y ago
  I had the same initial reaction to the idea; however on second thoughts it actually sounds like an interesting book for someone like me that is stuck with a PHP, Python, C/C++ background. It would be nice to touch briefly on 7 other, very different, languages (especially Scala and Ruby) and see what they taste like. So, yeh; I reckon this would be a good book for an already proficient programmer to pick up the beginnings of a few new languages.
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    Prolog can blow your mind, too, perhaps even more so than Haskell.
- robryan 17y ago
  This book seems to be more of an introduction that promising anyone there going to fully learn a language a week. I think the week in the title implies more about the introduction size.
- acangiano 17y ago
  Posting that link in reply to this submission may indicate a possible misunderstanding about the point of this book.
  - jorgeortiz85 17y ago
    I think the implied criticism is valid. This book is the "Reader's Digest" version of learning seven languages and four programming paradigms. You won't learn a new programming paradigm in a week.
    - pfedor 17y ago
      But you may learn what's out there. Not all learning has to be in-depth learning. Getting an overview of a field is important too. Reading Hacker News won't teach you anything in-depth either but you choose to do it for the same reason.
      - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
        i concur. there is room on the shelf for a "survey course" of paradigms
    - DannoHung 17y ago
      I sincerely disagree. I had a class on programming languages in college. It was one semester and went into very little depth of each language and paradigm covered. That said, I didn't know that half of the stuff that we were taught about existed before that class, and it spurred me to learn more and to learn at a greater depth. I doubt that there's going to be any illusion about what this book is. Surveys are vital for new learners to help them build the cognitive maps of the knowledge space they need to be able to understand what they don't know. Maybe you don't talk to a lot of working programmers, but there are a frighteningly large number of people who just don't know anything about programming language syntax and paradigms not descended from Algol-68
    - davidmathers 17y ago
      You won't learn a new programming paradigm in a week. If Donald Rumsfeld were here he would say to you: There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. The point of this book, obviously, is to turn people's unknown unknowns into known unknowns. Not for them to become competent programmers of 7 languages in 7 weeks.
    - chollida1 17y ago
      Agreed, but there is a reason why every masters program out there has a survey course were students each spend a class teaching a topic to other students. There is a lot of value in knowing what is going on in your field.
lionhearted 17y ago
Question - I've got more of a business background than a technical background. I can do basic html and I've played around in Linux a tiny little bit, but that's pretty much it. Anyone have any recommendations for getting more familiar with programming in a fun, laid back way? Nothing specific I want to do with it, just think it'd be a neat thing to spend some hours in. All recommendations appreciated greatly.
- elbenshira 17y ago
  Unfortunately, one cannot learn how to program in a "fun, laid back way." Yes, it's fun and a joy, but it will often be frustrating. With that said, The Little Schemer is a good one to start on.
  - fnid 17y ago
    I don't think that's true. I learned how to program in high school and we had a network and it was fun to write computer programs to allow my classmates to send messages over the network to other students. This was back in the Novell messaging days. I also did a lot of graphics programming drawing neat images and a chess game. It's no more frustrating than losing at poker or some type of competitive game or politics.
    - elbenshira 17y ago
      Yes, it is fun. But see, if you want to dig deep, then you are eventually going to hit topics and discussions that you can't easily warp your mind around. Learning computer science is not always an easy and happy road.
      - brianto2010 17y ago
        In context, lionhearted doesn't want to 'dig deep'. Rather, he 'just thinks it'd be a neat thing to spend some hours in.' He doesn't have to learn hard topics if he doesn't want to. Plus, if he does, then it should/would be for his own enjoyment.
- 17y ago
elbenshira 17y ago
Seems like an interesting concept. I just hope that the author does not treat each of the seven languages as its own entity. That is, I want a comparative description over the different languages.
bayareaguy 17y ago
Although title makes me skeptical (why 7 languages? why 7 weeks?), this sounds interesting since I don't know those languages. I hope it does more then repackage what I could otherwise easily find.
jlgosse 17y ago
I love that you are supportive of random languages! I feel bad for you because you will never find a job working in any of those languages. Kidding, 1/100 jobs will be working with one of these languages. Let's discuss why
- dschobel 17y ago
  But there's a high correlation between companies which trust their programmers to use the right tool for the job and companies which "get it" (it being how to develop and maintain technology). Will that eliminate 99/100 companies? Probably not that many but it will eliminate a lot, and you should be glad. After my first job, I learned to always ask what a company is doing for source and configuration control. If they have no answer or a bad one (Visual Source Safe), that will tell you a lot about the environment. Same thing if it's an MS shop that refuses F# or a java shop which refuses Clojure a priori.
  - JoeAltmaier 17y ago
    "Getting it" may be right for us (developers) but wrong for the company. A florist that needs order tracking isn't trying to change the software world. That persuasive guy thats insists SmallTalk is gods gift to florists is NOT doing them a favor.
    - Zak 17y ago
      Perhaps not, but writing it in Java isn't exactly doing them a favor either as it increases time and cost for development and changes. The Right Thing for such a situation is probably a compromise between language power and popularity. Ruby or Python with one of the popular frameworks that makes half the decisions for you would probably be a good choice.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  I've replied to this at length: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901411 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901411
- 17y ago
ramanujan 17y ago
Summary books like this are great as long as you know you're not an expert by the time you finish them. The goal is to let you know what you don't know, and to help you recognize a problem that would be easily solved by one of these languages (which would then spur deeper learning of the language). Reminds me of one of my favorite books ever, Gershenfeld's "The Nature of Mathematical Modeling". http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Mathematical-Modeling-Neil-Gershenfeld/dp/0521570956 http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Mathematical-Modeling-Neil-Gers...
aatif 17y ago
Why Python is not there in the list?
- riffraff 17y ago
  because it overlaps almost completely with ruby. And Io, probably.
tokipin 17y ago
i don't understand why people think it's impossible to grok languages on first glance. even if that were the case, having more languages under your belt (especially non-similar languages) makes the next languages you learn that much easier
- JoeAltmaier 17y ago
  I remember (way) back when going from C to C++. It took 8 weeks of sweat, deleting code (Bad Joe! Not OO!) and rethinking it, before my brain switched enough synapses and I was in the groove. And 10,000 hours of object-oriented design practice to be able to say constructive things about others' designs.
billswift 17y ago
If you are interested in surveys of paradigms and older languages (1998), there is the 4 volume "Handbook of Programming Languages" edited by Peter Salus - they are cheap used from Amazon. Volume One Object-Oriented Programming Languages : Smalltalk, C++, Eiffel, Ada 95, Modula-3, Java Volume Two Imperative Programming Languages : Fortran, C, Pascal, Icon Volume Three Little Tools and Languages : EQN, Domain Specific Languages, awk, sed, SQL, Tcl and Tk, Perl, Python, Music languages Volume Four Functional and Logic Programming Languages : Lisp, Scheme, Guile, Prolog
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  There's also CTM (_Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming_, http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html) by Van Roy and Haridi. It focuses on programming paradigms rather than languages, but covers several along the way.

62 points by fogus 17y ago

tokenadult 17y ago

http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html

ErrantX 17y ago
I had the same initial reaction to the idea; however on second thoughts it actually sounds like an interesting book for someone like me that is stuck with a PHP, Python, C/C++ background. It would be nice to touch briefly on 7 other, very different, languages (especially Scala and Ruby) and see what they taste like. So, yeh; I reckon this would be a good book for an already proficient programmer to pick up the beginnings of a few new languages.
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  Prolog can blow your mind, too, perhaps even more so than Haskell.
robryan 17y ago
This book seems to be more of an introduction that promising anyone there going to fully learn a language a week. I think the week in the title implies more about the introduction size.
acangiano 17y ago
Posting that link in reply to this submission may indicate a possible misunderstanding about the point of this book.
- jorgeortiz85 17y ago
  I think the implied criticism is valid. This book is the "Reader's Digest" version of learning seven languages and four programming paradigms. You won't learn a new programming paradigm in a week.
  - pfedor 17y ago
    But you may learn what's out there. Not all learning has to be in-depth learning. Getting an overview of a field is important too. Reading Hacker News won't teach you anything in-depth either but you choose to do it for the same reason.
    - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
      i concur. there is room on the shelf for a "survey course" of paradigms
  - DannoHung 17y ago
    I sincerely disagree. I had a class on programming languages in college. It was one semester and went into very little depth of each language and paradigm covered. That said, I didn't know that half of the stuff that we were taught about existed before that class, and it spurred me to learn more and to learn at a greater depth. I doubt that there's going to be any illusion about what this book is. Surveys are vital for new learners to help them build the cognitive maps of the knowledge space they need to be able to understand what they don't know. Maybe you don't talk to a lot of working programmers, but there are a frighteningly large number of people who just don't know anything about programming language syntax and paradigms not descended from Algol-68
  - davidmathers 17y ago
    You won't learn a new programming paradigm in a week. If Donald Rumsfeld were here he would say to you: There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. The point of this book, obviously, is to turn people's unknown unknowns into known unknowns. Not for them to become competent programmers of 7 languages in 7 weeks.
  - chollida1 17y ago
    Agreed, but there is a reason why every masters program out there has a survey course were students each spend a class teaching a topic to other students. There is a lot of value in knowing what is going on in your field.

lionhearted 17y ago

Question - I've got more of a business background than a technical background. I can do basic html and I've played around in Linux a tiny little bit, but that's pretty much it. Anyone have any recommendations for getting more familiar with programming in a fun, laid back way? Nothing specific I want to do with it, just think it'd be a neat thing to spend some hours in. All recommendations appreciated greatly.

elbenshira 17y ago
Unfortunately, one cannot learn how to program in a "fun, laid back way." Yes, it's fun and a joy, but it will often be frustrating. With that said, The Little Schemer is a good one to start on.
- fnid 17y ago
  I don't think that's true. I learned how to program in high school and we had a network and it was fun to write computer programs to allow my classmates to send messages over the network to other students. This was back in the Novell messaging days. I also did a lot of graphics programming drawing neat images and a chess game. It's no more frustrating than losing at poker or some type of competitive game or politics.
  - elbenshira 17y ago
    Yes, it is fun. But see, if you want to dig deep, then you are eventually going to hit topics and discussions that you can't easily warp your mind around. Learning computer science is not always an easy and happy road.
    - brianto2010 17y ago
      In context, lionhearted doesn't want to 'dig deep'. Rather, he 'just thinks it'd be a neat thing to spend some hours in.' He doesn't have to learn hard topics if he doesn't want to. Plus, if he does, then it should/would be for his own enjoyment.
17y ago

elbenshira 17y ago

Seems like an interesting concept. I just hope that the author does not treat each of the seven languages as its own entity. That is, I want a comparative description over the different languages.

bayareaguy 17y ago

Although title makes me skeptical (why 7 languages? why 7 weeks?), this sounds interesting since I don't know those languages. I hope it does more then repackage what I could otherwise easily find.

jlgosse 17y ago

I love that you are supportive of random languages! I feel bad for you because you will never find a job working in any of those languages. Kidding, 1/100 jobs will be working with one of these languages. Let's discuss why

dschobel 17y ago
But there's a high correlation between companies which trust their programmers to use the right tool for the job and companies which "get it" (it being how to develop and maintain technology). Will that eliminate 99/100 companies? Probably not that many but it will eliminate a lot, and you should be glad. After my first job, I learned to always ask what a company is doing for source and configuration control. If they have no answer or a bad one (Visual Source Safe), that will tell you a lot about the environment. Same thing if it's an MS shop that refuses F# or a java shop which refuses Clojure a priori.
- JoeAltmaier 17y ago
  "Getting it" may be right for us (developers) but wrong for the company. A florist that needs order tracking isn't trying to change the software world. That persuasive guy thats insists SmallTalk is gods gift to florists is NOT doing them a favor.
  - Zak 17y ago
    Perhaps not, but writing it in Java isn't exactly doing them a favor either as it increases time and cost for development and changes. The Right Thing for such a situation is probably a compromise between language power and popularity. Ruby or Python with one of the popular frameworks that makes half the decisions for you would probably be a good choice.
RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
I've replied to this at length: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901411 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901411
17y ago

ramanujan 17y ago

Summary books like this are great as long as you know you're not an expert by the time you finish them. The goal is to let you know what you don't know, and to help you recognize a problem that would be easily solved by one of these languages (which would then spur deeper learning of the language). Reminds me of one of my favorite books ever, Gershenfeld's "The Nature of Mathematical Modeling". http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Mathematical-Modeling-Neil-Gershenfeld/dp/0521570956 http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Mathematical-Modeling-Neil-Gers...

aatif 17y ago

Why Python is not there in the list?

riffraff 17y ago
because it overlaps almost completely with ruby. And Io, probably.

tokipin 17y ago

i don't understand why people think it's impossible to grok languages on first glance. even if that were the case, having more languages under your belt (especially non-similar languages) makes the next languages you learn that much easier

JoeAltmaier 17y ago
I remember (way) back when going from C to C++. It took 8 weeks of sweat, deleting code (Bad Joe! Not OO!) and rethinking it, before my brain switched enough synapses and I was in the groove. And 10,000 hours of object-oriented design practice to be able to say constructive things about others' designs.

billswift 17y ago

If you are interested in surveys of paradigms and older languages (1998), there is the 4 volume "Handbook of Programming Languages" edited by Peter Salus - they are cheap used from Amazon. Volume One Object-Oriented Programming Languages : Smalltalk, C++, Eiffel, Ada 95, Modula-3, Java Volume Two Imperative Programming Languages : Fortran, C, Pascal, Icon Volume Three Little Tools and Languages : EQN, Domain Specific Languages, awk, sed, SQL, Tcl and Tk, Perl, Python, Music languages Volume Four Functional and Logic Programming Languages : Lisp, Scheme, Guile, Prolog

silentbicycle 17y ago
There's also CTM (_Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming_, http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html) by Van Roy and Haridi. It focuses on programming paradigms rather than languages, but covers several along the way.