Seven Languages in Seven Weeks (part 1)

A few weeks ago, Peter Olson proposed here at Marvel a nice initiative: learning 7 different programming languages in 7 weeks.

The idea came to Peter after he read the book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages by Bruce A. Tate.

Of course I had to be part of this initiative and also all the Digital Team joined it. We started 2 weeks ago. The book is organized in a way that in a timeframe of a week you can learn some basics of different languages. There are daily assignment. Some are trivial like “Install Ruby”. Some are complicated like “Solve a Rubik Cube in Prolog”.

The first week it was about Ruby. I knew some Ruby and the book showed me some new concepts I didn’t explore before. Ruby is a very nice language. Even thought sometime it is to “sugary”. You can code the same tasks in so many different ways. For instance, [1..10].each do |i| print i end can be achieved 10.times do |i| print i end and other ways. I like Ruby.

The second week was about Io. Io is a nice prototypical language. Unfortunately, is it not widely adopted. Some packages are not mantained and updated often. For instance, the Regex library has an important bug but it has not resolved for almost 9 months now. I like Io because it shares some concepts to Javascript.

The 3rd week will be about Prolog. I am trying to figure this out. So far, this language is very weird, but it intrigue me.

The best part is also a conjunction of languages and food. Peter had the brilliant idea to mix languages and snacks. So far we had Pizza for Ruby and Indian for Io. For Prolog … stay tuned for next post.