Agreed - when I play with a language I normally like to building something like a simple Trie implementation to get a feel for the collections library. I guess

Agreed - when I play with a language I normally like to building something like a simple Trie implementation to get a feel for the collections library. I guess a shell is a pretty good learning project though, as you can just expand its scope to touch upon most of a language's API surface area as you go: - Want to see how a language handles IO? cd, ls, mkdir and friends will give you a pretty good introduction. - Want to look at the http lib? A simple wget clone.